About 45 years ago, Mortimer Adler sat down at his manual typewriter with a list of authors, books and 102 great ideas. He began writing in alphabetical order beginning with Angel and ending with World. The essays, originally published in the Syntopicon (1952), were part of Encyclopaedia Britannica's Great Books of the Western World, and were revised in 1988 for EB's second publication of the series. They are, according to Clifton Fadiman, Adler's finest work.