Bert wrote:I only have the first 6 books of the Iliad and none of the Odyssey.
I would like to have all the books of both poems.
What is the best way to get them.
How good are your eyes?
Are they available in one volume?
They are not. In fact, all editions of Homer I know of have two books for each poem, requiring a total of four volumes for all of them, with a fifth for the Homerica (the Hymns, The Battle of Mice and Frogs, testamonia, etc.).
If your eyesight is good, for the Iliad I'd recommend M.M. Willcock's edition (easily had these days). It's not too expensive, it has the full Iliad in two volumes, and a commentary that isn't as full as Benner's, but is still quite useful. To keep the price reasonable and the size of the book down, the printing is quite compressed.
For the Odyssey there is Stanford's two volumes, again with text and commentary. I find this easier to read. In my experience it's a little harder to find both volumes.
When you are prepared to go off into the deep end of Homeric Scholarship, I'd recommend West's Teubner Iliad. It's quite current and is based on massive manuscript evidence. The apparatus criticus is thus huge: the first page of the opening of the Iliad has 5 lines of text and the rest of the page is app crit. For most of the book 1/2-3/4 of the page is devoted to Iliad text. The current accademic commentary - which is in reference to the Allen OCT - is in, um, six volumes (Kirk, et al.). I believe someone is working on a new commentary based on West's text, but it will be in German (first volume recently reviewed at
BMCR).
I'm still using the OCT Odyssey. I believe there may be a more current Teubner, but I don't know how much work went into it. The standard full commentary is by Heubeck, et al, and weighs in at a more modest 3 volumes. It is also keyed to the OCT.