Christianson Scott - 100 books that changed the world

100 BOOKS

that changed the world

100 BOOKS

that changed the world

Scott Christianson and Colin Salter

This book is dedicated to
Scott Christianson (19472017)

An original copy of the 1450s Gutenberg Bible the first book to be printed using movable type. Colourful hand-painted decorations have been added to this opening page. (See .)

A nineteenth-century woodblock print by Utagawa Kunisada showing a scene from what is often hailed as the worlds first novel, The Tale of Genji (c. 1021) by Murasaki Shikibu. (See .)

Whats your favourite book? Why did it inspire you? Did it make you laugh? Or cry? Or gasp with wonder? Did it change your world? Now imagine trying to choose a hundred, not just from your own shelves, not just from your local library, but from the entire history of the written word.

So how do you choose? Where do you start? This book starts at the very beginning with a 4,800-year-old text, the divinatory I Ching, which predicts the future based on the toss of six coins. We end ninety-nine books later in the twenty-first century with another prediction, Naomi Kleins This Changes Everything, which forecasts the end of the planet if we dont act collectively to mend our ways. On the pages in between, our list is drawn from every age, in every style and on every subject. All of them have changed their readers worlds, and ours.

The oldest printed texts were stamped into clay while it was still wet, then baked into permanence. As handwriting developed, it became easier to copy texts out onto sheets of papyrus, vellum, or paper. But it would still take a team of monks several years to produce a single beautifully illustrated manuscript copy of the Bible. The world was truly changed with the invention of printing. The Bible was the first book to be printed with movable type, in the 1450s. Although it took Gutenberg three years to print roughly 180 copies of it, it was significantly faster than a team of monks.

Mass production of books not only lowered the cost but enabled the faster spread of knowledge and the exchange of ideas. In the wake of Gutenbergs invention, the first scientific volumes start to appear on our list of world-changing books. Copernicus leads the way in the modern era with On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543). Weve included Robert Hookes microscopic images (Micrographia, 1665), Isaac Newtons mathematics (Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, 1687) and Carl Linnaeuss classification of species (Species Plantarum, 1753). Each of them benefited from the exchange of ideas in books, combined with the insights of their own particular genius. Each in turn was read by others; Henry Grays Anatomy, Descriptive and Surgical (1858), Charles Darwins On the Origin of Species (1859) and Albert Einsteins Relativity (1917) were all, as Newton put it, standing on the shoulders of giants who had gone before them. Books carry new knowledge forward into the future.

Printing had the same world-shrinking impact as the development of the Internet five hundred years later. Nowadays, you can share information or ask questions with friends and colleagues on the other side of the globe almost instantly. Or you can send emojis: not all text messages change the world, after all.

The publication of Copernicuss On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres in 1543 contradicted fourteen centuries of belief by stating that the Sun, not the Earth, was at the centre of the universe. (See .)

A plate from William Henry Fox Talbots The Pencil of Nature (184446), the first commercially published book illustrated with photographs. (See .)

Nor do all books. But the oldest-known work of literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2100 BC) is here. Its a Sumerian tale of gods and men that today might be described as magic realism. Joining it are more recent combinations of magic and reality, including The Arabian Nights from the ninth century and Gabriel Garca Mrquezs 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. Literature makes magic across the millennia.

Storytelling makes up a large part of our list. Looking back, we admire the fiction of earlier centuries for what it reveals about the times in which it was written. Geoffrey Chaucers The Canterbury Tales (1390s), for example, or Jane Austens Pride and Prejudice (1813), are snapshots of time and place. But for their first readers, as well as their modern ones, those ancient works of literature captured something more: the human condition. The best literature shows us the best and worst of ourselves. We are all flawed, and it is easier to see the flaws in others than in ourselves, especially if, as in Jonathan Swifts Gullivers Travels (1726), they are transferred to completely imaginary worlds. But we all have goodness, too, embodied in fictions heroes. Don Quixote shows us a remarkable nobility of spirit, no matter how misguided. Harry Potter, another character on a quest, is a model for the moral strength we all wish we had.

Good literature changes our inner world by helping us to understand human behaviour. Sometimes it goes further and changes the world around us. Charles Dickenss observations of Victorian poverty were instrumental in improving the conditions of the working class. Alexsander Solzhenitsyns One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch (1962) was the first chink of light to be shed on the secretive cruelty of Stalins gulags, a revelation that contributed eventually to the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Books can be exquisitely beautiful objects, but what concerns us here is their inner beauty, the power of their words, their capacity to startle us into new ways of thinking with just a few well-chosen letters. Words can be powerful in many ways: evocative, emotive, persuasive, prescriptive, informative, misleading, lyrical, musical, incomprehensible, revealing. Words can do whatever a good author wants them to do for his or her readers.

Religious writing is perhaps the most powerful of all and therefore the most dangerous, as well as the most inspiring. The Torah, the Quran and the Bible all make it onto our list; but so too do books that show the ugliness of excessive religious zeal. Anne Franks