The idea of the Harvard Classics was introduced in various speeches by then President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard University. Several years prior to 1909, Eliot gave a speech in which he remarked that a three-foot shelf would be sufficient to hold a enough books to give a liberal education to anyone who would read them with devotion. He was inundated with requests for the list of those book titles that would fill the three-foot shelf. After numerous attempts to support his initial claim, he decided that the shelf would need to be lengthened to five feet - but a definitive list of works was not declared. A well-known publisher Peter Fenelon Collier and his son, Robert J. Collier, saw a financial opportunity and made a proposal for Eliot to make good on this statement by proposing that he select 50 volumes (400 to 500 pages each). Collier representatives proposed names for the series as either "The Harvard Library" or "The Harvard Classics" pending approval by Harvard University. The proposal, presented to the President and Fellows of Harvard College, was unanimously approved as a useful undertaking from an educational point of view.