Input/feedback would be welcome. I'm giving a presentation
this week on "why you should have a library in your pocket"
at the Wolfram Data Summit. I've been working on a special
collection of around 100 items that could be put on a
CD/DVD, mobile device, etc. (in different formats: HTML, EPUB,
or others). My goal is to have a test version of this
collection by then.
My listing is below as tab-delimited, and attached as an XLSX.
If you notice any important omissions, please mention them!
Criteria are:
- interesting and worthwhile
- English only
- coverage of different types of content (i.e., reference, classics,
non-fiction...)
- only one item per author
- must (probably) be public domain worldwide:
- published pre-1923
- author, illustrator, translator death dates pre-1944 (life+70)
This turned out to be harder than I thought, but lots of fun. I
used our Bookshelves, Top 100, GUTINDEX.ALL, and other sources.
I occasionally left something out that I thought was better forgotten
(such as Taylor's "Scientific Management"), and made one or two
arbitrary choices (such as Twain's "Connecticut Yankee" instead
of Huck or Tom).
The Genre categories are also somewhat arbitrary. Most of these have
a great bibrec in gutenberg.org, but I just used a generic term like
"fiction" or "history." Several items could use multiple genres, but
I am just including one (for example, Oscar Wilde is listed as Humor, not
Fiction).
Thanks, and happy reading!
-- Greg
Project Gutenberg Selections
The goal of this collection is to identify interesting and important works from the Project Gutenberg collection.
"Every effort was made to identify items that are most likely in the public domain worldwide, not just in the US."
Genre eBook # Title Author last Author first etc. Author death Translator last Translator first etc. Translator death Notes
Adventure 1257 Dumas Alexandre The Three Musketeers 1870
Adventure 521 Defoe Daniel Robinson Crusoe 1731
Adventure 2701 Melville Herman "Moby Dick, or, the Whale" 1891
Adventure 996 Cervantes Miguel Don Quixote 1616
Business 8581 Barnum P.T. The Art of Money Getting 1891
Children/youth 271 Sewell Anna Black Beauty 1878
Children/youth 14838 Potter Beatrix The Tale of Peter Rabbit 1943
Children/youth 166 Wharton Edith Summer 1937
Children/youth 113 Burnett Frances Hodges The Secret Garden 1924
Children/youth 1597 Andersen Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales 1875
Children/youth 11171 Stowe Harriet Beecher "Uncle Tom's Cabin, Young Folks' Edition" 1896
Children/youth 5747 Alger Horatio Do and Dare: A Brave Boy's Fight for Fortune 1899
Children/youth 19068 Grimm Jacob Household Stories by the Brothers Grimm 1863
Children/youth 289 Grahame Kenneth The Wind in the Willows 1932
Children/youth 55 Baum L. Frank The Wonderful Wizard of Oz 1919
Children/youth 503 The Blue Fairy Book Lang Andrew 1912
Children/youth 17412 Hope Laura Lee Bobbsey Twins Syndicate author
Children/youth 28885 Carroll Lewis Alice's Adventures in Wonderland 1898
Children/youth 514 Alcott Louisa May Little Women 1988
Children/youth 120 Stevenson Robert Louis Treasure Island 1894
Children/youth 35997 Kipling Rudyard Jungle Book 1936
Children/youth 3005 Appleton Victor Tom Swift and his Airship Syndicate author
Children/youth 39784 Mother Goose
Children/youth 18732 Aesop's Fables
Classics 11000 Clay Albert Tobias Gilgamesh 1925
Classics 7768 Lamb Charles The Adventures of Ulysses 1834
Classics 2383 Chaucer Geoffrey Canterbury Tales 1400 Purves David Liang 1873
Classics 5668 Scott Jonathan The Arabian Nights Entertainments 1829 Burton Richard 1890
Classics 1497 Plato Republic -347
Classics 24269 Homer The Odyssey of Homer -650 Cowper William 1800
Fantasy 829 Swift Jonathan Gulliver's Travels 1745
Fiction 5231 Trollope Anthony The Way we Live Now 1882
Fiction 730 Dickens Charles Oliver Twist 1870
Fiction 1260 Bront‘ Charlotte Jane Eyre 1855
Fiction 768 Bront‘ Emily Wuthering Heights 1848
Fiction 145 Eliot George Middlemarch 1880
Fiction 14155 Flaubert Gustave Madame Bovary 1880
Fiction 209 James Henry The Turn of the Screw 1916
Fiction 215 London Jack Call of the Wild 1916
Fiction 4300 Joyce James Ulysses 1941
Fiction 42671 Austen Jane Pride and Prejudice 1817
Fiction 14591 von Goethe Johann Wolfgang Faust 1832 Taylor Bayard 1878
Fiction 39452 Bunyan John Pilgrim's Progress 1688
Fiction 219 Conrad Joseph Heart of Darkness 1924
Fiction 103 Verne Jules Around the World in 80 Days 1905
Fiction 160 Chopin Kate Awakening 1904
Fiction 2600 Tolstoy Leo War and Peace 1910 Aylmer Maude 1939
Fiction 45 Montgomery Lucy Maud Anne of the Green Gables 1942
Fiction 84 Shelley Mary Frankenstein 1851
Fiction 33 Hawthorne Nathaniel The Scarlet Letter 1864
Fiction 73 Crane Stephen The Red Badge of Courage 1900
Fiction 27 Hardy Thomas Far from the Madding Crowd 1928
Fiction 135 Hugo Victor Les MisŽrables 1885
Fiction 1245 Woolf Virginia Night and Day 1941
Fiction 599 Thackeray William Makepeace Vanity Fair 1863
History 18 Hamilton Alexander Federalist Papers 1826
History 816 de Tocqueville Alexis Democracy in America 1859 Reeve Henry 1895
History 25717 731 732 733 734 735 736 890 891 892 893 894 895 Gibbon Edward The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire 1974
History 5199 Shackleton Ernest South! 1922
History 23 Douglass Frederick The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass 1895
Horror 345 Stoker Bram Dracula 1912
Horror 41 Irving Washington The Legend of Sleepy Hollow 1859
Humor 972 Bierce Ambrose The Devil's Dictionary 1914
Humor 308 Jerome Jerome K. Three Men in a Boat 1927
Humor 74 Twain Mark Adventures of Tom Sawyer 1911
Humor 86 Twain Mark A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court 1910
Humor 844 Wilde Oscar The Importance of Being Ernest 1900
Humor 19942 Voltaire Candide 1778
Mathematics 201 Abbott Edwin Flatland 1926
Mystery 1661 Doyle Arthur Conan The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes 1930
Non-fiction 575 Bacon Francis The Essays of Francis Bacon 1626
Non-fiction 1717 Chesterton G.K. What's Wrong with the World 1936
Non-fiction 205 Thoreau Henry David "Walden, and On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" 1862
Non-fiction 769 Okakura Kakuzo The Book of Tea 1913
Non-fiction 61 Marx Karl Communist Manifesto 1883
Non-fiction 16643 Emerson Ralph Waldo Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson 1882
Non-fiction 4200 Pepys Samuel The Diary of Samuel Pepys 1703
Non-fiction 3755 Paine Thomas Common Sense 1809
Poetry 8800 Alighieri Dante "The Divine Comedy by Dante, Illustrated" 1321 Note: multi-file HTML
Poetry 19 Longfellow Henry Wadsworth Song of Hiawatha 1882
Poetry 20 Milton John Paradise Lost 1674
Poetry 11101 Coleridge Samuel Taylor The Rime of the Ancient Mariner 1834
Poetry 38877 Yeats W.B. Poems 1939
Poetry 1322 Whitman Walt Leaves of Grass 1892
Poetry 16328 Anonymous Beowulf 1928
Reference 10681 Roget Peter Mark Roget's Thesaurus 1869
Reference 1 Declaration of Independence
Reference 2 Bill of Rights
Reference 4938 U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses
Religion 17 Smith Joseph Book of Mormon 1844
Religion 274 Luther Martin Martin Luther's 95 Theses 1546
Religion 10 Anonymous "The Bible, Old and New Testaments, King James Version"
Religion 7145 Egyptian Book of the Dead Budge E. A. Wallis 1934
Religion 2388 "The Song Celestial; Or, Bhagavad-G”t‰" Arnold Edwin 1904
Science 944 Darwin Charles Voyage of the Beagle 1882
Science 59 Descartes RenŽ Discourse on Method 1650
Theatre 5333 Jonson Ben Every Man in his Humor 1637
Western 1300 Grey Zane Riders of the Purple Sage Syndicate author
Criteria Life+70
English only
One item per author
"If the item is part of a set, I included the set (for example, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire)"
"When there are multiple versions, I usually chose the one with the better HTML and images"
Original publication before 1923
"Death dates of authors, illustrators & translators: prior to 1944 (life+70)"
World copyright guidelines: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/okbooks.html#whatpd
Some notable exclusions
"Sun Tzu, The Art of War" Translator death date
"Marcel Proust, Rememberance of Times Past" Translator death date
HG Wells Author Death Date
Einstein Author death date
Machievelli's The Prince Translator death date
Peter Pan Copyright exception in the UK
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