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The New York Public Library’s website last week put out a list of the 25 books that changed history. Here they are:
1984 by George Orwell
Aesop’s Fables by Aesop
The Analects of Confucius by Confucius
The Art of War by Sun Tzu
King James Bible
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson
The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
Hiroshima by John Hersey
How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis
I Ching: The Book of Change
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet A. Jacobs
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill
Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin
The Qur’an
Republic by Plato
The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine
The Second Sex by Simone De Beauvoir
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu
The Torah
One question we’re asking as part of City Limits’ four-month-long series on the city’s libraries is what role books (real ones, with covers and paper) have in an age when most text is digitized and libraries do a lot more than simply provide people with access to text.
What do you think of this list? Do you think every branch library should have a single copy of each of these books? Comment below!
This post is part of an ongoing project looking at the potential for New York’s libraries to fill a critical gap in our civic infrastructure, as well as the challenges and difficult choices the library systems face. It is supported by the Charles H. Revson Foundation. Read the full project here.