The World's Best Books: A Key to the Treasures of Literature

Parsons argues that reading the best literature is not a leisure activity but a systematic discipline essential to personal development. He states the book's fivefold purpose: to call attention to the importance of reading the best literature to the exclusion of all that is inferior; to select the best from all literatures and locate the richest mines; to place the great names in their proper relations of time and space; to discuss methods of reading, including system, quantity, quality, proportion, and thoroughness; and to gather the thoughts of great men on these subjects . He rejects haphazard, indiscriminate reading—'a torrent of even the best in literature, so rapid and long continued that it cannot be properly absorbed and digested' produces injury rather than benefit .

Parsons organizes literature into a sequential library with 'first' and 'second' shelves, beginning with Religion and Morals, then Poetry and Drama, Science, Biography, History, Philosophy, Essays, Fiction, Oratory, Wit and Humor, and Fables. Table I presents the two shelves of the World's Library; Table II offers 'Glimpses of the Great Fields of Thought' for breadth of mind; Table III provides a year's course of selections 'for the formation of a true literary taste'; Table IV is a supplementary short course; and Table V maps the distribution of authors in time and space alongside contemporaneous historic events . The method is to read systematically, with due proportion, owning the books, and following an order that builds from foundations to breadth.

Parsons argues that literature directly exercises and develops the mind's faculties—perception, memory, reason, and imagination—and indirectly provides knowledge of the conditions for their strength . On character, he writes that 'if we continually love, our power and tendency to love will grow,' and that 'the poet's passion, passing the gates of the eye and ear into our souls, rouses our sympathies to kindred states of feeling' . Literature can also aid health indirectly by imparting physiological knowledge and directly by supplying mental exercise essential to 'the balance of the functions necessary to perfect health' . He warns that bad books can 'greatly injure, if not wholly destroy' the mind.

The first edition appeared in 1889, published by Little, Brown and Company . A third edition, 'revised and enlarged,' was published in 1893 . Parsons's preface to the third edition credits 'the work of my colleagues, F. E. Crawford and H. T. Richardson, consisting of criticism, verifications, and assistance in gathering materials for the appendix' . The third edition added 'a number of valuable works to the lists of the first edition' and 'a new chapter on the guidance of children, the means of training them to good habits of reading, and the books best adapted to boys and girls of various ages' . The book entered the public domain and is available through Project Gutenberg.

The World's Best Books belongs to Parsons's period as a Boston lecturer and writer, more than a decade before his economic reform writings and two decades before founding the Vocation Bureau. The connection is methodological: the same conviction that reading can be systematically organized and improved for human development later animated his approach to vocational guidance, where he insisted young people should not 'hunt' for any job but should make informed choices based on systematic knowledge of themselves and the world of work . His biographer Richard Gummere Jr. described him as 'a challenging example for counselors today as both a social crusader and a pioneer in the systematic guidance of youth'.