Because the words 'Time' and 'Life' are so generic and common, doing searches with them included brings up millions of useless links, and it's hard to sort the wheat from the chaff when you're throwing words around like 'millions.' So, congratulations on finding this catalog! I hope it proves helpful to you - and if it doesn't, please drop me a note and let me know what you were looking for. took its name from the parent company's two most successful magazine titles, and opened its doors in 1961. I have had a life time's love for these books. This is not even a little bit exaggerated. I didn't always have money to get groceries, but I paid my Time-Life and encyclopedia bills. I started to buy sets of my own(and my own set of encyclopedias) my first year away from home. You didn't have to be a professor to understand them. She and I were the only ones in the household who ever read them, and I devoured each one when it came. I was greatly upset that mom wouldn't let me have the ones we had(along with the encyclopedia set) when I finally left the nest. If you had Time-Life series displayed in your living room, you felt just a little bit smarter than the average family. They looked very impressive on a bookshelf near the TV - like rich people's collections. They were lovely, both inside and out, affordable, and they arrived in the mail every other month, which felt like a present.

My mom and my grandmother loved the Time-Life books, and I did too. That aspect of their marketing is something I'll have to investigate when I have the time and opportunity. I'm curious if they ever advertised their book sets in TIME or LIFE magazines during that time period - all our magazine subscription money went to the needlecraft magazines I grew up with. We would get ad flyers in the mail announcing new series. All of their series were direct marketed - you couldn't buy them in a book store. If the set was popular, they'd make up new titles, and if the set tanked, then they could cut it short. More annoying is the fact that Time-Life didn't even publish a list of the volumes in a set in the set itself - which is why I went on-line to look in the first place! I believe they didn't publish the list of all the volumes in the set because they didn't know how many they were going to publish.

I found this lack of basic information annoying. I discovered this while checking to see if one of my sets was complete.

By the time I was able to go looking, they had stopped publishing any books(that was in 2001) and apparently didn't like to acknowledge that they ever had. This page is dedicated to the bibliographies of Time-Life book series because I couldn't find a bibliography of any of the Time-Life book series I owned - not even on the Time-Life website. Time-Life Book Series Bibliographies (last updated: November, 2021) Time Life Book Series Bibliographies HOME /

Time Gettysburg by Time-Life Books