Book List

The other day I mentioned an exhibition I'd seen at the State Library of Victoria. It wasn't just about encyclopedias but about the whole history of the development of the book. While I was there, I learnt that a codex is a book made of folded sheets sewn along one edge and bound between boards; that the word 'incunabula' is derived from a Latin word meaning 'cradle' and refers to books printed before 1500, ie during the birth of printing; and that the Gutenberg bible is sometimes called the 42-line bible because that is the number of lines in each column of the book.

As well as picking up facts for pub quizes, I also saw some beautiful things: an eleventh century copy of a text by Boethius on the relationship between maths and music; several fifteenth century books of hours, dense with exquisite illuminations showing scenes of medieval life; and some early printed works. After the handwritten manuscripts, the printed works seemed very dull, but, as the exhibition points out, quoting the French historian Lucien Febvre, 'The end of one epoch is the beginning of another. An elite society gave way to a mass society.'
 
Finally, the state library exhibition suggested a list of the most influential books of all time. This is it:

The Bible
The Koran (which apparently means 'to read' or ' to recite')
The Prince by Machiavelli
The Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin
Das Kapital by Marx
Mein Kampf by Hitler
The Little Red Book by Mao tse Tung
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer

They also put forward Wilberforce's Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade, Marie Stopes's Married Love, Freud's Collected Writings, Gandhi's Collected Writings, the Hindu texts called Vedas, the Torah (although it is a scroll, not a book, and on that subject I love this) and the Dharma texts of the Buddhists, as runners up.

I will have to think about what I would put in. I suppose it depends on what you mean by influential and I guess one has to distil it down to what has been influential on your own culture. On those grounds the Bible is, of course, in - without it, we wouldn't have all the works of religious art and architecture that we do, for a start. The Koran is in, partly because the September 11 attacks changed everything. Mein Kampf shouldn't be in, I don't think, because I am not aware that it was the book rather than clever politicking that brought Hitler to power (I'm probably wrong about that, as I know virtually nothing about the subject - it's just my impression.) Similarly, I wonder whether it was Mao's Little Red Book that led to his rise to power. I suppose The Origin of the Species did alter our consciousness, although there are plenty of quotations you could take from the works of Shakespeare, for example, that suggest that, without articulating the theory, the underlying ideas of much of Darwin's work existed already, if that makes any sense. Freud definitely is part of the list for me, as, despite a lot of what he posited being wrong, his ideas have permeated the way we think, to the point where we barely notice them. I've never read De Beauvoir or Greer. I guess they have been influential, although I am not sure how influential - and I don't think their influence has been particularly positive, for two reasons. The first is that neither of them successfully addressed the central conundrum facing women - how to manage child bearing and a career. As a result, many women and their children find themselves in a different but not necessarily a better situation than before.  The second is that their influence seems to have been pretty much entirely confined to the middle classes in the West -  in the Muslim world women continue to be oppressed and even occasionally stoned to death.

I would love to read anyone else's 10 most influential books of the world list. In this context, the ten most important books about the twentieth century, chosen by Tony Judt, are listed here