This cassette series brought to my living room the opportunity to sit at the feet of some of America's finest Ivy League professors as they lecture on the books that form the corpus of the Western Literary Tradition. Wish I'd done this series years ago. Would have been beating my husband at Jeopardy all this time. Purchasing the new series directly from The Teaching Company would have been more than I could afford but this identical cassette version so cheaply priced compared to the current format, so I just purchaed a cheap cassette player at Amazon Marketplace. (Love marketplace sellers, reliable plus save you a fortune!) The lectures chosen for the "Great Authors" series are the best that one can expect from collegiate academia. I'm so happy with my purchase that I'm going to search through other Teaching Series, cassette version, learning while saving by buying on cassette.