Around 1910, Charles Eliot, President of Harvard, came up with the ‘five-foot shelf of books’ – a series of volumes that would provide a relatively thorough education to a reader at home. Others have picked up the idea, such as Blackwell’s in Oxford, who have a list of some 70 volumes that comprise their five-foot shelf.
So I decided to do the same.
I measured it, too, just to make sure (although the photo has some substitutions due to works that are in anthologies, or later swapped out in the final list). I didn’t repeat authors, either, for breadth of voices. Also, for the purposes of a physical stack, I only used books I do actually own – I have some favorites that aren’t on my shelves, and therefore not included. Lastly, while graphic novels are permitted, comic collections were ruled out (such as the Complete Calvin and Hobbes).
Here,
then, are my 75 books for a ‘five-foot shelf’:
Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
All the
King’s Men – Robert Penn Warren
Answer
to Job – Carl Jung
The
Apology – Plato
Ariel –
Sylvia Plath
Atonement
– Ian McEwan
Averno –
Louise Gluck
Barabbas
– Par Lagerkvist
Beloved
– Toni Morrison
Between
the World and Me – Ta-Nehisi Coates
Blindness
– Jose Saramago
Blood
Meridian – Cormac McCarthy
Brave
New World – Aldous Huxley
Brideshead
Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
A Brief
History of Time – Stephen Hawking
Buying
a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather – Gao Xingjian
The
Cheese and the Worms – Carlo Ginzburg
Children
of Gebelawi – Naguib Mahfouz
Citizen:
An American Lyric – Claudia Rankine
Collected
Fictions – Jorge Luis Borges
The
Compleet Molesworth – Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle
The
Dawn of Everything – David Graeber and David Wengrow
Death
and the King’s Horseman – Wole Soyinka
Death
Comes for the Archbishop – Willa Cather
Dialogues
Concerning Natural Religion – David Hume
The
Discoveries – Alan Lightman
Don Quixote
– Miguel de Cervantes
Eichmann
in Jerusalem – Hannah Arendt
Existentialism
from Dostoevsky to Sartre – Walter Kaufman
Fleurs
du Mal – Charles Baudelaire
The God
of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
Guns,
Germs, and Steel – Jared Diamond
Hamlet –
William Shakespeare
The
House of the Spirits – Isabel Allende
Human
Acts – Han Kang
The
Hunger Angel – Herta Muller
I Know
Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
In
Pursuit of the Unknown – Ian Stewart
The
Invention of Tradition – Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger
Invisible
Cities – Italo Calvino
Jacques
the Fatalist – Diderot
Kaddish
for a Child Not Born – Imre Kertesz
Madame
Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
Maus –
Art Spiegelman
Memoirs
of Hadrian – Margeurite Yourcenar
Middlemarch
– George Eliot
Midnight’s
Children – Salman Rushdie
The
Misanthrope – Moliere
Moby
Dick – Herman Melville
Mrs.
Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
Native
Son – Richard Wright
Never
Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
Odyssey
– Homer
Oedipus
Rex – Sophocles
One
Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Pale
Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
Pedro
Paramo – Juan Rulfo
The
Periodic Table – Primo Levi
The
Plague – Albert Camus
Platero
and I – Juan Ramon Jimenez
Play It
as It Lays – Joan Didion
A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
The
Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas – Machado de Assis
The
Presentation of Self in Everyday Society – Erving Goffman
Romance
of the Three Kingdoms – Luo Guanzhong
The
Second Sex – Simone de Beauvoir
Season
of Migration to the North – Tayeb Salih
Silent
Spring – Rachel Carson
Sleepwalking
Land – Mia Couto
Two-Part
Prelude and Tintern Abbey – William Wordsworth
The
Underground Railroad – Colson Whitehead
Voices
from Chernobyl – Svetlana Alexievich
Watchmen
– Alan Moore and David Gibbons
Why
Societies Need Dissent – Cass Sunstein
Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind – Shunryu Suzuki
