For Weekends, the Dark of Night and Beyond: Project Gutenberg’s Best Books Ever Listings

 Woman in an unknown library, Wikimedia Commons

Editor’s Note: Our favorite book about storage is Bookshelf  by Alex Johnson, published by Thames & Hudson, with 305 color illustrations: “Bookshelves today are no longer just somewhere to store books. They are modern art, engineering experiments and — just as they were for Samuel Pepys 350 years ago — status symbols. … Justin Pollard, in his 2010 book, Boffinology: The Real Stories Behind Our Greatest Scientific Discoveries, suggests that the idea of the bookwheel (a device that allowed the user to flick between pages of information) was a forerunner of the Internet.“

Once you  run out of space for bookshelves in cases, there’s always the Staircase pictured on page 164: “Architects Levitate constructed tis staircase in a London flat, where space limitations, coupled with the client’s goal of building a library, led to the reation of an innovative library staircase that holds around two thousand books. (Editor’s Note: If truth be told, however, we spy that there are many Penquin editions within that number.) The staircase was designed by structural engineers Rodrigues Associates to transfer te weight of the stairs and books back to the main walls of the building. It dangles from the upper floor, thereby avkooiding any complicated issues with neighbours living below.”

After having purchased three biblioteques ourselves in New York City (ABC Home) and Westport, CT to help house our books, we bought a step tansu in San Francisco. Still, I dream of other designs and this book lays out an intriguing number of fanciful and practical choices to choose from.  Now, to set my husband to work …

Norwegian Book Clubs in Oslo (2002)

In 2002, the editors of The Norwegian Book Clubs asked 100 authors to nominate ten books that, in their opinion, are the ten best and most central works in world literature. This list was reprinted in The Guardian in 2002. Here’s the list.

© signifies original publication still copyrighted in the U.S.

1. Don Quixote  (English) by Miguel de Cervantes
   Don Quixote  (English)
   Don Quixote, Volume 1 , Volume 2  (English)
   Don Quixote  (English)
   Don Quixote  (English)
   Don Quixote  (English) (read by computer voice)
   Don Quixote, Volume 1  (English) (read by Chip, Sara Schein, Anita Roy Dobbs, Kelly Bescherer, Denny Sayers, Kirsten Ferreri, Cynthia Lyons, Gesine, Kathleen Dang, Marian Brown, Zachary Brewster-Geisz, Robert Foster, Joplin James, Lizzie Driver, Andy Minter, and Katy Preston)
   Don Quijote  (Spanish)
   Don Quichot  (Dutch)
   Don Quichotte, Tome 1 , Tome 2  (French)
   L’ingénieux chevalier Don Quichotte de la Manche  illustrated by G. Roux (French)
2. © Things fall apart by Chinua Achebe
3. Fairy tales and stories  by Hans Christian Andersen
   Project Gutenberg also has other versions and translations of Andersen’s fairy tales.
4. Pride and Prejudice  by Jane Austen
   Pride and Prejudice 
   Pride and Prejudice  (read by Annie Coleman)
   Pride and Prejudice  (read by Chris Goringe, Kara Shallenberg, Kristen McQuillin, suburbanbanshee, Gord Mackenzie, Sureka Goringe, Mark Bradford, Annie Coleman, Elisabeth Shields, Sherry Crowther, PenelopePitstop, Gesine, Eileen aka e, and ajikan81)
   Pride and Prejudice  (read by Karen Savage)
5. Old Goriot  by Honoré de Balzac
6. © Trilogy: Molloy, Malone dies, The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett
7. The Decameron  (English) by Giovanni Boccaccio
   The Decameron, Volume 1 , Volume 2  (English)
   De Decamerone  (Dutch)
8. Collected fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
9. Wuthering Heights  by Emily Brontë
10. © The Stranger by Albert Camus