Our books today are samples from the delightful old line of Viking Portables that flourished in the postwar years and whose compact, jam-packed format has by now entirely disappeared and, given the givens of our post-literate society, will likely never appear again.

They’re instantly recognizable on the shelves of used bookstores, these Viking Portables: they’re squat and thick and colorful, an unapologetically high-brow anthology series originally designed for US servicemen during World War II and maintained for years afterwards as tight-printed little bricks of literature. At one time or another, I think I’ve owned nearly every Viking Portable that’s ever been made, but these six stand out for me:

The Viking Portable World Bible – This 1944 volume assembled by Robert Ballou is a true gem. It contains accessible English-language excerpts from all the major Scriptures of the world – the Rig Veda, Upanishads, and Bhagavad Gita of Hinduism, the New and Old Testaments of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Dhammapada and the Diamond Sutra of the Buddhists, the arcane texts of the Zoroastrians, selections from the Koran and the sayings of Confucius, and generous portions of the Tao Te Ching. Each faith gets a short but remarkably comprehensive Introduction, and the translations used, though hardly ever ecstatically poetic, are clear and easy – and the result is surprisingly eye-opening: running the foundational scripts of all the world’s major faiths together in one volume, reading them that way, has a remarkably exposing effect on their purported wisdoms. Small wonder, I’ve always thought, that most of the atheists I’ve known in the last sixty years owned a well-read copy of this book.

The Viking Portable Roman Reader – Basil Davenport edited this 1951 volume with the intent of creating a one-stop market for all the choicest bits of the literature of ancient Rome – an impossible goal, but he comes damn close to achieving it. He ranges across centuries to find the best English-language translations of passages from Virgil, Livy, Horace, Ovid, Petronius, Marital, Juvenal, Tacitus, Cicero, Caesar, Catullus … and he brings his volume all the way up to Boethius and St. Augustine. Each of the great “ages” of Roman literature gets its own perceptive (if slightly waspish) introduction, and like all the best anthologies, this one leaves the reader hungry to find more of the writings of each author it includes. Of course, once the best, most skillfully translated and annotated versions of those authors have been hunted down, a book like the Roman Reader isn’t needed anymore – but it’s served a mighty good purpose.

The Viking Portable Medieval Reader – Edited by James Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin in 1949, this volume takes a thematic approach to its sprawling subject (European life and literature from 1050 to 1500), grouping writings under headings like “The Body Politic” or “The Christian Commonwealth” or “The Noble Castle” and bringing together writers across a span of centuries and perspectives, everybody from Gerald of Wales to John of Salisbury to Peter Abelard and St. Francis of Assisi. And Ross and McLaughlin venture far afield from these usual suspects as well, including dozens of fascinating and now-forgotten Medieval writers, many of whom are getting their first accessible English-language translation in these pages. The Viking Portables often made genuine little advances over mere reprint anthologies in just this way, and I remember how thrilled I was to find some of these writers (old friends of mine from long, long months of study) appearing in a bright paperback for sale in every bookshop in Iowa. Who knows how many medievalists today were inspired by the thrilling variety they encountered in this volume and a couple like it?

The Viking Portable Renaissance Reader – It’s not surprising that the same holds true for this wonderful 1953 entry, since it too is edited by Ross and McLaughlin – in fact, this book may very well represent the pinnacle of what the Viking Portables achieved. The Table of Contents is organized along the same lines as the Medieval Reader, thematically rather than strictly chronologically; we get intriguing headings like “An Age of Gold,” “The City of Man,” “The Book of Nature,” and “The Kingdom of God,” and filling out those sections we once again have not only famous names like Marsilio Ficino, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Boccaccio, Cervantes, Montaigne, and Machiavelli but also another assembly of now-forgotten lesser lights, sometimes presented in their first mass-market English-language translation. And the effect of all these voices together, writing with such amazing skill and learning and humor on all the most important questions of their time (a time whose wonder they saw as clearly as later ages have seen it) is electrifying – something critics back in 1953, every bit as predisposed to ignore popular reprint volumes as their present-day counterparts are, noticed almost in unison, which is always nice.

The Viking Portable Elizabethan Reader – Hiram Haydn edited this 1946 volume roughly along the same organizing principles as the Medieval and Renaissance readers: there are groupings here for exploration, astronomy, religious schism, courtly life, engagement with the past, and half a dozen others. But if anything, the range of titans assembled in these pages is even greater than what Renaissance Florence could produce: Donne, Spenser, Sidney, Jonson, Wyatt, Bacon, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and a dozen others, all excerpted with a very discerning ear, all combining to create a vibrant portrait of an age (indeed, just about the only shortcoming is that Haydn only sees fit to include one passage from the writings of the queen who gave her name to the age – and not a particularly good passage at that). And like all the best Viking Portables, there’s quite a bit included in this volume that can’t easily be found elsewhere.

The Viking Portable Tolstoy – In this post I’ve shied away from Viking Portables devoted to one author, but this big 1978 volume edited by John Bayley (and featuring throughout the sturdy Maude translations) deserves to be the exception. The predictable way to do a 900-page Tolstoy anthology would involve a 200-page excerpt from War and Peace and a 200-page excerpt from Anna Karenina, and Bayley knows this and pointedly avoids doing it. Instead, he fills his volume with other Tolstoy – selections of autobiographical writings, a stage-play, and plenty of essays, all filtered through Bayley’s unobtrusive but infinitely knowing editorial discretion. For many years that now embarrass me, the unconventionality of this volume annoyed me, but now I see it for the genius it is, giving the overworked business commuter and the curious student a Tolstoy very different from the crafter of long, forbidding epics, and giving them such a generous helping of that other Tolstoy that they really come to know him.

One by one as the years went by, the Viking Portables disappeared from bookstores. A handful of them were reprinted in larger trade paperbacks with such shoddy production quality that their covers would pop loose from their pages if you so much as looked at them funny (and the covers themselves had become boring, neither the Art Deco drawings nor the evocative photographs of earlier versions). But the bulk of the line was simply allowed to lapse out of print, and I’ve always considered that a real shame. These books were designed to be both fascinating and timeless; the deserve to be finding their way into the libraries of readers in the 21st century. The Penguin Press rescued one of the best-selling books in the line, the Viking Portable Dorothy Parker, dusted it off, gave it a spiffy new design, and added it to their Deluxe Classics line. Surely all the old Viking Portables deserve the same treatment? If nothing else, then in recognition of past service?