List

“I’ve got a little list…”

by

Barry Kritzberg

Chicago Literary Club

1 December 2003

Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner of Titipu in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, approaches his task in a cheerful and professional manner. He is sure that there will be “no difficulty in finding plenty of people whose loss will be a distinct gain to society.”

He then sings.

A libretto without music can be, I know, a good deal like Gilbert without Sullivan, but if I were to be the medium of Sullivan’s melodies, you’d much prefer to have your Gilbert plain, without my warbling Sullivan’s wood-notes wild.

In short, I will not sing.

If I were to sing, my first appearance before the Chicago Literary Club might well be my last.

Ko-Ko does sing, however (feel free to hum along if you are so inclined):

As some day it may happen that a victim must be found,

I’ve got a little list—I’ve got a little list

Of society offenders who might be under ground

And who never would be missed—who never would be missed!

What follows, of course, is Ko-Ko’s catalogue of offenders who would not be missed. He rounds up all of the usual suspects: all people with flabby hands and irritating laughs, children who are up on dates and who floor you with them flat, the people who eat peppermint and pop it in your face, and other such annoying types.

And then there is the chorus:

He’s got ‘em on the list—he’s got ‘em on the list

And they’ll none of them be missed—they’ll none of them be missed.

If my title brought you here in the belief that you would be in for a learned disquisition on the Victorian social criticism implicit in The Mikado, I’m afraid you will be disappointed by what follows, for here I part company with dear old Gilbert and fond old Sullivan.

Never mind Ko-Ko’s list. I’ve got my own.

We all know about lists, for we encounter them soon after the cradle. Our first serious list, I suppose, is that catalogue of easy-to-put-together, insert-flap-A-and-throw-away Christmas toys we’d like Santa to deliver even sooner than Christmas eve or Christmas morning.

We advance, seven ages of man fashion, to more sophisticated and possibly even more interesting lists: the grocery items, which we dutifully write out, and leave on the dining room table as we head out the door to the store; the new year’s resolutions, made only to be broken so that we may put them on our list the next year.

In fact, it seems as though we cannot escape lists, for they are everywhere: we go to a baseball game and get our scorecards ready for the line-up; we go to a play, and scan the characters, arranged alphabetically or by appearance; we see a movie and dutifully watch until the end, while the credits roll interminably.

Line-ups? Credits? Let us not deceive ourselves: we are talking about lists.

And we all know how one list can lead to another: the line-up leads to lists of winners, hitters, best this and greatest that, until matters become more and more esoteric: the list of the best left-hand first-basemen, over 6 feet 5 inches tall and weighing more than two hundred and thirty pounds who played American Legion ball in Iowa and went to college (however briefly) in Kansas before matriculating with the Chicago Cubs. Why, only recently I saw a book which suggested even more possibilities. It was called the List of Baseball Lists.

Plays, too, invite us to make lists (as Shakespeare’s Polonius does) of “the best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, [or] tragical-comical-historical-pastoral.”

Movies, too, give us endless lists: the top twenty-five foreign films, the best one hundred love stories of all time, and the perennial refuge of tired reviewers, “one of the year’s ten best!”—said, with conviction, at least one hundred times per year.

Menus, recipes, itineraries, movements in a symphony or concerto, the members (arranged alphabetically) of the Chicago Literary Club, the Seven Cardinal Virtues, the Seven Deadly Sins, Don Giovanni’s conquests: choose whatever euphemism you like, but just remember, we are only talking, after all, about a list.

We, like Ko-ko, can make a list out of anything: cars that we have owned, places we have lived, guests to invite, guests not to invite, allergies we have, allergies we would like to have, restaurants we would like to go to, recipes to try, itineraries, and even our computers urge us to create lists of our favorite websites. All, all are lists.

Man has been defined in a variety of ways that are said to separate us from other animals: we are called the thinking animal, the tool-making animal, the laughing animal. We are all of these distinctive things, no doubt, but perhaps we should add one more important characteristic to this little list: we are the list-making animal.

You may be clever enough to conclude from this little prelude that my subject is lists and I want to assure you that you have not missed the mark.

But, what kind of lists?

Well, since this is a literary club, I thought I should confine my remarks to that darling of all lists, the literary list (also known as the summer reading list, the Christmas reading list, or, most simply, the book list).

But, what kind of book list?

This will not be merely a random list of Bizarre Books, since Russell Lash and Brian Lake have already compiled a volume of lists under that catch-all title. Some of their found titles, alas, have never made an appearance on my, or perhaps any one else’s, lists. I have not spent much time in book stores looking for the 1909 anonymous volume, Laundry Lists with Detachable Counterchecks in French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian, Including Vocabularies and Necessary Phrases and Phonetic Spellings. I have also failed to add to any of my lists, Shad Helmstetter’s 1982 What to Say When You Talk to Yourself.

And even if I smoked or liked to play with matches, I doubt that I ever will be in search of Raymond W. Norris’ 1982 Lights! Catalogue of Worldwide Matchbox Labels with the Word ‘Light’ in the Title.

Lash and Lake did suggest a book that might be of interest to nervous sea travellers: How to Abandon Ship. My account of reading lists will not, I trust, have the same result as Charles J. Dunphie’s helpful 1879 study, called Sweet Sleep. A Course of Reading Intended to Promote That Delightful Enjoyment.

No; this will be about the books that have kept me awake.

For a book lover, the next best thing to a stack of unread books close at hand is a reading list in hand. The length doesn’t matter. Any book list will catch the conscience of the avid reader.

When I was a young man, still in high school, I gave more than lip service to Mark Twain’s notion that one should never let one’s schooling interfere with one’s education. The things I read in books that I found on my own were a lot more interesting than the books, especially textbooks, that I was expected to read for classes. I was also influenced by Matthew Arnold’s “touchstones of literature” and I accepted, without reservation, his dictum that one should endeavor to know the best that was known and thought in the world and to make it known.

It seemed so sensible, so obvious. I thought I would easily find out the best that was known and thought by asking those who were supposed to know about such matters of high seriousness. In asking around, however, I found that, for many, the fleeting passions of the moment often took precedence over the loftier idealism of Arnold.

I put my questions to book-sellers, too, but I sensed that their responses were often motivated by a passion that clouded their judgement about which books were best. I suspected that getting rid of overstock was the hidden agenda of some of their recommendations.

I decided I would have to find my own way to the best that was known and thought in the world. There was a sense of urgency about it, too, for as Henry Thoreau warned, with time’s winged chariot at his back, one should read the best books first.

But where to find them, where to find them?

Thoreau, in that lovely chapter on “Reading,” in Walden, urged that one should read the classics, and I took that to heart too.

I was not daunted by Twain’s cynical observation that a classic was a book that everyone knew about, but no one read.

I needed, in short, not cynicism, but guidance.

In other words, I needed a reading list.

I had used ready-made reading lists in the past, of course, as I systematically made my way through the Beatrix Potter books, the Uncle Wiggily stories, the Hardy boys, Nancy Drew, the Oz books, and others.

I found my first significant intellectual reading list close at hand, almost by accident, on the inside of the dust-jacket of my $2.95 Modern Library Giant edition of Melville’s Moby Dick.

There, at the top of the Modern Library list, was the very question I had been pondering: “Which of these 385 outstanding books do you want to read?”

“All of them,” I silently replied, and my education was as smoothly launched as was Ahab’s Pequod from Nantucket. If Ishmael could find his Yale and Harvard college on a whaling vessel, then I might find my Yale and Harvard on a Modern Library Moby Dick dust jacket.

But how to do it?

I had a list, but I lacked a system. I thought I might proceed numerically, as I did with the Hardy boys, and tick them off one-by-one. Perhaps I would begin with the Modern Library Giants (since I had already owned and had read Moby Dick). I could read item number G1, Tolstoy, Leo War and Peace, and follow it up with G2, Boswell, James, The Life of Samuel Johnson, and G3, Hugo, Victor, Les Miserables.

That plan was abandoned, however, for there seemed to be no logic at all in reading a Russian novel, followed by an English biography, and then a French novel. The only thing they seemed to have in common was their size. They weren’t called giants for nothing, after all.

The next approach was to tackle the list as presented, alphabetically. I would begin, therefore, with Adams, Henry, The Education of, number 76, and read straight on through to Zola, Emile, Nana, 42.

After Zola, however, was a worrisome section marked “miscellaneous,” which listed such troublesome titles as An Anthology of Irish Literature, 288, The Arabian Nights Entertainment, 281, Best American Humorous Stories, 87, and so on. When, in the grand scheme of things, should those be read?

Read the best books first, Thoreau had advised, but where was one to start when there were 385 of them? The sensible method employed to be sure I read all the Hardy boy books didn’t seem apply.

It was about that time that I read (again, by chance) J.C. Stobart’s The Glory that was Greece, which was not among the Modern Library elite 385.

Stobart’s book, as the title might suggest, is an enthusiastic survey of the history, literature, and art of Greece. At the end of it, there was a bibliography (which, as we all know, is the scholar’s fancy word for “list”). Now, a bibliography, like an index or a table of contents, was something that this reader usually skipped over in his haste to get to the next book.

This time, however, I perused the list, and the first item in Stobart’s bibliography sounded quite familiar. It was J.B. Bury’s History of Greece, G35 on the Modern Library list.

That, at $2.95, was the next book I would read and, gradually, a plan for reading emerged. Stobart gave me a general introduction to the best that was to be thought and known about Greek culture and Bury took me a little deeper into that world. By the time I finished that Giant (G35) undertaking, I knew where I would go next.

I doubt that, in those youthful days, I made a sharp distinction between primary and secondary sources (and questions of translation never troubled my sleep), but I had read enough of Arnold to suspect that one wouldn’t stray too far from the best that was known and thought in the world if one started with Homer. I read The Complete Works of (G19), in the prose translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey by S.H. Butcher, Andrew Lang, Walter Leaf, and Ernest Myers.

Gilbert Highet’s introduction to the volume persuaded me that I was on the right track when I read that The Iliad and The Odyssey were “the oldest complete books in the Western world.” There is much to be said, after all, for beginning at the beginning of things. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes (each available in $1.95 Modern Library editions) were next in line, followed by the Greek historians, and then Plato and Aristotle, and another Modern Library Giant, G45, the Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers.

Just as I was beginning to think that, with the help of the 385 titles on the Modern Library list, I would make sense of the world after all, my tidy Ptolemaic view of the universe was shattered by a new and dangerous Copernicus: the Everyman Library.

“Everyman,” the inscription on the fly-leaf read of the Everyman edition of Dickens’ Edwin Drood and Master Humphrey’s Clock (# 725), “I will go with thee and be thy guide, in thy most need to stand by thy side.”

These words, intended to be comforting and reassuring, had on me an impact that was as comforting and reassuring as Jocasta’s attempt to persuade Oedipus of the folly of heeding oracles.

Curious (and worried!) about that “725”on the dust-jacket, I turned to the back of the book (now almost a matter of habit), and discovered, to my horror, that the best that was to be known and thought in the world was not confined to the 385 volumes of the Modern Library.

This was not the first time, incidentally, that The Mystery of Edwin Drood had put me in a quandary. I had chosen Dickens’ novel for a book report in eighth grade, not because I knew much about the author, but because I liked mysteries.

I had started it late, no doubt the night before the report was due, and was absolutely dumbfounded

to find the story end—just stop—with a comma, and the murder unsolved.

Dickens, I discovered by going back to the introduction, had died before completing the volume and, worse yet, had not even left any drafts or notes to hint at a solution to the crime.

I conceived a new appreciation for introductions, but how, I wondered, could I write a book report on a stupid novel that wasn’t even finished? There was no time to read another book, so I sat down to write a report called, quite modestly, “The Greatest Mystery Ever Written.” It was the greatest mystery ever, I argued, because no one, but no one (and certainly not me) could say who did it. The teacher, although she did not suspect the true source of my ingenuity, rewarded me with an “A.”

This time, old Edwin Drood caused problems of another sort. The Everyman Library classified list of Everyman titles numbered 925, in thirteen sections no less, and there were devious hints which suggested that the list would continue to grow.

This wasn’t helpful. I wanted my book list to be short, simple, and manageable, but Ernest Rhys’ Everyman’s Library was making it long, complicated, and miserable. I wanted to follow Matthew Arnold’s dictum to seek to know the best there was to be known and thought in the world, but how could I do that if it were, like The Mystery of Edwin Drood, never to have a conclusion?

Since the Everyman Library had a mere 540 more titles than did the Modern Library, I reasoned that the finding the best to be known and thought in the world would be a far more complicated undertaking than I had so naively imagined it to be.

And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.

It did not dawn on me, of course, that publishers might have a vested interest in promoting their own lists, for I assumed that those who published classics were motivated by nothing other than high seriousness. I was still looking for someone to be my guide, but I was a little wary of having to carry the burden of 925 “must read” volumes.

The classical section (with familiar names like Aristotle and Sophocles) was comforting, but the biographical section was dismaying. I liked biographies, but I had never heard of Richard Baxter and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know about Lord Beaconsfield, and Colley Cibber seemed too silly a name to be taken seriously.

Other sections, too, were annoying. Oratory, to my mind, was for speech classes, romances were only for girls, and I wouldn’t be caught dead reading a book intended for young people.

It was then that I discovered that certain colleges (notably Columbia, the University of Chicago, and St. John’s) concentrated exclusively on reading the classics and, better yet, one could get the reading list simply by requesting a catalogue.

The St. John’s list of great books had just the tone of high seriousness I was seeking.

“The books that serve as the core curriculum were chosen over a period of forty years,” the catalogue explained, “first at Columbia College, at the University of Chicago, at the University of Virginia and, since 1937, at St. John’s College,” and the freshman year reading list had (in more-or-less chronological order) nearly all the names that I thought should be on such a list: Homer, Aeschylus, and all the rest.

These college reading lists seemed, somehow, more reliable than the fickle and arbitrary choices recommended by publishers. It was reassuring, too, to see that what Columbia freshmen read in, say, 1937 was very much like what Columbia freshmen read in 1986.

Columbia freshmen, in 1937, read in the first semester:

Homer, Iliad

Aeschylus, Oresteia

Sophocles, Oedipus the King and Antigone

Euripides, Electra, Iphigenia in Taurus and Medea

Aristophanes, The Frogs

Plato, The Apology, Symposium and Republic

Aristotle, Ethics and Poetics

Lucretius, On the Nature of Things

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Vergil, Aeneid

The 1986 freshmen reading list for the first semester was virtually identical, but longer. Added were the Odyssey, the poems of Sappho, the anonymous Hymn to Demeter, and Thucydides Pelponnesian War. Two plays of Euripides, Electra and Iphigenia in Tauris, were dropped, but his magnificent Bacchae took their place. In other words, the “Columbia ten,” as I like to call them, from Homer to Vergil, stayed on the list through the years.

When film critic David Denby returned to Columbia in 1991 to retake the famous required courses in classics he had taken there in 1961, he came to a conclusion that surprised him. “The core curriculum courses,” he wrote, “jar so many student habits, violate so many contemporary pieties, and challenge so many forms of laziness that so far from serving a reactionary function, they are actually the most radical courses in the undergraduate curriculum.” (And if someone wants to create a list of books about books, perhaps David Denby’s Great Books should be included.)

The Columbia ten were all represented in the Modern Library, but Lucretius and Marcus Aurelius were relegated to sharing space in the anthology, The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers. A look at the classical section of the Everyman Library showed that all ten were represented.

When Mortimer Adler, the man behind the Great Books idea, published How to Read a Book (1940), he conveniently appended a list of the great books. All of the “Columbia ten,” save Marcus Aurelius, were included.

Clifton Fadiman, a student of Adler, carefully followed the foot-steps of his mentor in The Lifetime Reading Plan (1960) by including nine of the “Columbia ten,” omitting only Aristophanes. Perhaps satirical humor no longer held a place among the practitioners of high seriousness in the Glory that was Greece lobby.

By 1996, however, the picture looked very different. The Modern Library’s “complete list of current titles” had less than two hundred titles—not including audio books. Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Lucretius, Marcus Aurelius, and Vergil had all vanished. Only Aristotle survived. The emphasis seemed to be on the very recent, as though only such books might win the hearts of the Now Generation. And so one found, in 1996, Truman Capote, Raymond Chandler, E.L. Doctorow, Shelby Foote, Joseph Mitchell.

Two classic (but not classical) authors—Jonathan Swift and Jane Austen—were included on the list, however, with a special distinction: a green dot, indicating that Gulliver’s Travels and Pride and Prejudice were “tie-in editions,” connected with television versions of the stories.

The Everyman Library has also shown a similar scaling down and skewing to present, all quite likely in pursuit of relevance (which, apparently, is always more profitable than tired old perennials). The 925 volumes that wanted to go with me and be my guide had been trimmed to just over one hundred. Not a lot of room for the “Columbia ten” there, and seven of them have been consigned to some other list, perhaps the Mark Twain Memorial List of books that no one would buy. Only Homer, Plato and Vergil won a place on the shelf (now considerably shorter) with Chinua Achebe, Michael Bulgakov, and Boris Pasternak.

The National Endowment for the Humanities, under Lynn Cheney’s direction, put out a list, too, of “Summertime Favorites.” It was intended for high school students, and the list was created by soliciting summer reading lists from schools all across the country.

Only three of the “Columbia ten”—Homer, Sophocles, and Vergil—made Lynn Cheney’s list, although the classical world might, in some eyes, be represented by Edith Hamilton’s Mythology and Robert Graves’ I, Claudius. Of the 105 authors on the NEH list, 47 were American and 36 were English. The French were represented by six authors, the Russians and the Irish had five each, and the Germans four. Several countries, like Spain and Norway, had only one writer each worthy enough to make the list, but many other countries, it seemed, had no literature worth reading at all. Perhaps Asia, Africa and Latin American writers have not been translated into the kind of English spoken at the National Endowment of the Humanities.

The Signet Classics, in these days of faxes and a special “quick-pick-telephone-number-toll-free” offered “a portable library of literary masterpieces” for the eye-catching price of $1,284.52. The titles included Shakespeare and Milton, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Melville and Thoreau, but oddly, only one Greek writer, the poet Sappho. For the other classics, for the “Columbia ten,” one would have to look elsewhere, perhaps to Penguin Books, which owned Signet Classics, and had its own list of classics.

It would not be far wrong to assume that I am almost as much-addicted to book lists as I am to books. My aim here, however, is not to be scholarly and exhaustive, but to offer, as Thoreau said, “a strong dose of myself,” however quirky that may be.

Return with me now, then, to those thrilling days of yesteryear—1974, to be exact-- when I had rented a house on Block Island. I had brought along the obligatory carton of books, but there was that always-lurking fear that I did not bring enough.

There was one book store on the island, but greeting cards and tee-shirts far outnumbered books.

There were a few paperback best-sellers, mostly mysteries, some books on sailing, and, on one table, an odd assortment of miscellaneous titles of the coffee-table genre.

One book, however, caught my eye. It was right up my alley. It was called, quite simply, Good Reading. The cover stated that it was “prepared by the committee on college reading” and that J. Sherwood Weber was the editor. The cover also proclaimed that it was “the 20^th edition of the noted guide to the world of books.”

This book list man was dumb-founded. I had never heard of it.

The price was right. It sold for $8.95 when it was published in 1969. A sticker said it was now $2.98. But that was crossed off, and it was reduced to $1.98. It still didn’t sell, and the price had been further reduced to 98 cents. It had been sitting on that table for five years, perhaps, waiting for the book list fanatic to come along.

I read the inner flap of the dust-jacket.

“The world of books is large,” it began, “and there are few road maps for readers who wish to explore it in all its variety and depth.”

I nodded my head in silent agreement.

“The book you hold,” it continued, “is perhaps the most useful guide to the world of books now in existence. Its many editions and revisions have made it more directly useful than ever before.”

I put it to my Columbia test. Seven of them were listed under “Greece” and the other three under “Rome,” and God was in his heaven and all was right with the world.

This was the book list I was waiting for, the one I dreamed about. It would keep me happy if that large carton of books did not fill out the vacation. I cheerily handed over my ninety-eight cents, delighted to add a hard cover book list to my collection of pamphlets, mimeographed sheets, dust jackets folded inside out, and pages torn from college catalogues.

After bicycling back to our rented house—we did not have a car—I sat down to contemplate this little list of two thousand books that I might some day read. I had already read some of them, of course, but there were many that I had not.

It was arranged in four convenient sections, “historical and regional cultures,” “literary types,” “humanities, social sciences, sciences,” and a “special section” for reference books.

The section on Greece, as an example of historical and regional cultures, listed collections, individual authors, and then books about Greece. The others, from the classical world to the 18^th century, were arranged in a similar fashion.

The “literary types” section provided lists of 19^th century continental novels, British and American works of the same century, and then repeated the process through the 20^th century. There were also chapters on poetry, the short story, drama, biography, and a catch-all section that covered essays and criticism.

The third section covered the other subject areas, from anthropology and sociology to history and religion.

I began, in compulsive list-maker fashion, checking off, with a red-pencilled “x,” those books I had read and circling those I wanted to read. I would just “x” those out, I decided in advance, when I completed them. The prospect was so exciting that I didn’t even think about finishing my carton of books before I started on this new and improved way of listing books.

By that stage of my reading, of course, I’d gotten beyond the requisites of paltry lists of 385 or 925 books. The Good Reading guide had more to offer, boasting of some 2,000 titles, arranged in a way to flatter my linear way of thinking: Greece, Rome the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and so on.

If the prospect of 2000 books was a little overwhelming, there was a shorter list, for the faint of heart, of just “100 significant books.” The section on “ancient times” easily passed the Columbia test and even included a few more authors that one should know; Confucius and Plutarch, for example.

Some years after the great Block Island discovery, I found two older copies of Good Reading, one edition from 1935 and the other from 1947, and both at prices that compared more than favorably with my ninety-eight cent Block Island purchase. I paid a dime for one and a quarter for the other.

The 1935 edition of Good Reading was the third and it was edited by Atwood H. Townsend, and compiled by the National Council of the Teachers of English, as solid an endorsement as the Good House-Keeping Seal of Approval. The first edition had been issued in 1932.

It was intended as a guide, the title page stated, “for college students and adult readers, briefly describing about a thousand books which are well worth knowing, enjoyable to read, and largely available in inexpensive editions.”

The committee that made selections consisted of deans, librarians, and professors of English, but representatives of other academic disciplines were not included in the final choices. The list, after all, was the project of the National Council of the Teachers of English.

College students were engaged to write about half of the one-to-two sentence descriptions of each book. Here, for example is J.R. Wright, of Northeastern University, on Homer’s Iliad: “Mystical, yet convincingly alive in its humanity; simple, yet a master-work of poetic craftsmanship—this epic of the Trojan War is a book to be read, re-read, and read again.”

Much of the actual business of tabulating results from the lists submitted by colleges was performed by various relief agencies that had been created to combat the Great Depression.

The 1935 Good Reading also contained a list of what undergraduates read. 1,638 students at 53 colleges submitted their own lists of recommended books. The most frequently recommended book by undergraduates was Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, followed by John Galsworthy’s The Forsythe Saga, Sinclair Lewis’ Arrowsmith, Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native and Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage. None of the Columbia ten made the student list and not even Shakespeare made it into the top fifty. The most ancient book on the student list was Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749).

The 1947 Good Reading, with Atwood H. Towsend still in charge, offered only slightly more than a thousand recommendations, but there were other important changes. The National Council of the Teachers of English continued to sponsor the project, but Penguin Books was the publisher, and there seemed to be an acknowledgement that those outside of college English departments might be able to suggest a title or two.

Some eighty of the 188 pages were given over to an introduction, a kind of brief intellectual history that provided a rationale and a context for the lists of books. Even when Homer was discussed, it was obvious the recent war was still very much on people’s minds:

“Homer is a war reporter second to none. In the Iliad, his other great epic, the battles between Greeks and Trojans are as vivid as if they were being televised on the spot and flashed halfway around the world across three thousand years.”

I wonder if that was the first time—1947, remember, is the date of publication—that television was employed as a simile to describe a work of literature.

The book lists follow a familiar pattern with, for the most part, very familiar names and not that many surprises. The Greeks seemed to become more important again in the post war years, and Aeschylus, Aristotle, Euripides, Herodotus, and Thucydides were back in the graces of those who chose the 100 significant books. Erasmus, Machiavelli, Malthus, Rousseau and Adam Smith were also added to the list. And, oh yes, two Americans were added as well: Herman Melville and James Fenimore Cooper.

Those who appeared on the 1935 list of 100 significant books, but were dropped from the 1947 list included Francois Villon, Tobias Smollett, Oliver Goldsmith, Addison and Steele, and, alas, W.S. Gilbert’s operettas.

For the 1947 edition of Good Reading, members of the advisory board (which included Clifton Fadiman, John Dos Passos, Carl Sandberg, and Sinclair Lewis) were asked for their personal lists of “basic books, the ones you would buy if your own library were somehow destroyed.”

Eleven members responded, and the most frequently named were Shakespeare, the Bible, Homer, War and Peace, Plato, Montaigne, Moby Dick, and one surprise: H.G. Wells, The Outline of History. Perhaps Wells’ optimistic, steady-march-of-human-progress was what people felt they needed to hear in those post-war years. The “Columbia ten” did not seem to rank very highly with the advisory board members (except for Clifton Fadiman), but Sinclair Lewis seemed to be operating on principles that were at odds with the philosophy of Good Reading.

“If my library were destroyed,” Lewis wrote, “the first thing I would buy is the first 20 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica.”

One may wonder, why only the first 20? If he were referring to the 11^th edition, was there nothing of interest to Lewis in volumes 21-29, nothing else that might matter after one finished that thrilling volume 20, which included all that one needed to know, from “Ode-to-Pay,” or was it simply a question of money?

The 1980 edition of Good Reading, published then by Mentor Books, was expanded to 2500 titles, but there was the usual shifting about among those to be included in the “one hundred significant books.” This shifting was more pronounced, as might be expected, as the committee considered books closer to the present.

There were no additions to the ancient world list, but Marcus Aurelius was gone. The section on significant books of the Middle Ages added Mohammed, but Cellini didn’t make the grade for 1980 readers.

Thomas Paine, Emily Dickinson and Ralph Ellison were in, but Ben Franklin, Sinclair Lewis and George Bernard Shaw were out.

The brief introduction to the “100 Significant Books” in the 1980 Good Reading was significant in another respect, however. It seemed less confident, less sure, than previous editions and hinted at, perhaps, disagreement in the ranks.

The list of “100 Significant Books,” it said, offered a “representative (my italics) selection of 100 books that many people have found rewarding to know; they are not necessarily the best or greatest works of imagination and thought.”

All of this only shows, of course, that making lists of books might almost be as much fun as reading them.

There are many other lists of books, to be sure, but I would be remiss if I did not mention one other very influential source for my personal reading lists: the books that other people didn’t want me to read, the very ones that some said that I shouldn’t read, that I dare not read. From the time I discovered, as a high school lad, the Index Prohibitorius of the Catholic church to the very latest version of the American Library Association’s list of banned books, I have, like Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, wanted to know the very things some people thought I shouldn’t.

I have profited, too, by discovering what others have thought should be on a Gilbert and Sullivan list of books that would not be missed. At a recent exhibit of Great Books at the University of Chicago, for example, there was a letter from Joseph Schwab to Robert Maynard Hutchins (November 4, 1943), in which he recommended that certain writers be cast into “oblivion.”

He did not put any of the Columbia ten on his list, so I assume that it would do no harm to read them. Those whom Schawb did condemn, however, would make a very nice summer reading list. He would have us forget Boccacio, Julius Caesar, Benvenuto Cellini, Jane Austen, Lewis Carroll, Nikolai Gogol, Thomas Hardy, Thomas Mann, Marco Polo, Moliere, Samuel Pepys, George Bernard Shaw and Henry David Thoreau. He also included “Bronte,” but since he didn’t specify which one, I assume that the whole scribbling family, in Schwab’s view, should be sent to some literary purgatory.

At the very beginning of my talk, when I mentioned Ko-ko’s list of society offenders who’d not be missed, I noticed a certain uneasiness among some members of the audience. I would like to conclude, however, by reassuring you, one and all, that in all of my research for this paper, I found, that no Chicago Literary Club member, past or present, had appeared on the Lord High Executioner’s list of society offenders who would not be missed.

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