Adler persevered, however, having spent the previous eight years of his life on the project. He single-handedly raised funds by selling more expensive “Founders Editions” of the sets, and disobeyed the order to fire his entire staff. There were times, during the process when he admitted: “the question was could we sell the plates for junk! Could we dispose of the plates as old metal?” Adler felt, through it all, that he was creating something completely new. The Syntopicon, he felt, would be revolutionary, its release on par with such events as the creation of the first dictionary. It would do for ideas what previous reference books had done for words and facts. He worked with a team of over 100 readers who met twice a week for years to discuss the readings and the ideas within them. Among his editorial team was a young Saul Bellow. In the end, he produced two volumes, which listed 102 Great Ideas of Western Civilization, intending them to be comprehensive of Western thought, alphabetically, from Angel to World. He realized no hierarchical scheme would command the assent of a pluralistic society where persons centered their thinking and loyalty around so many different ways at looking at things, though allowing for non-prescriptive hierarchical listings of smaller ideas within the greater ideas. The set was released with much fanfare, including an honorary gifting of the first two editions to U.S. President Harry S. Truman and Elizabeth II. An internal memo from Encyclopædia Britannica, regarding a release party, reads: The projected sequences of events is: (1) Mr. Hutchins kicks off the conference with a discussion of the Great Books movement, and the university’s and Britannica’s interest in the set; (2) Mr. Adler tells in detail of the contents of the set and the significance of the Syntopicon; (3) Cocktails. The second edition of Great Books of the Western World contained six additional volumes of works from the twentieth century, like James Joyce, Max Weber, etc. The second edition of the Syntopicon added, to each of the articles on the great ideas, references to the works in the additional volumes and revisions to the introduction to each great idea to include some mention of how the given idea was understood by the twentieth-century authors in the collection. Purpose In addition to being a “special idea” that would set Great Books of the Western World apart, the Syntopicon