DEMOCRATIC CAPITALIST PROTESTANT--ONLY TAKES THREE BOOKS (WELL, REALLY JUST THE ONE):

The world's best books: When Melvyn Bragg set out to pick the books that changed mankind he found himself making some startling choices (Sunday Times of London, 3/19/06)

or those of us who love to read, the idea that a book can have an influence is not news. Our perceptions have been shaped through books, our store of information heaped up, our tastes extended, perhaps refined, our sense of humour tickled, our sense of well-being restored or reinforced; we have been excited, alerted, moved, consoled, felt less alone, even felt morally improved and inspired — at least for a while. We know that books can change us as individuals.

On a different level books have often been and still are the agents of creeds that have shaped and reshaped humanity. These generally religious books would, I think, have figured prominently in the reckoning for a list of the 12 most influential books in the world. At one stage I had a list dominated by the ancient Greeks, books of God, Marx and Mao and two or three books of science. It felt unsatisfactory; too ambitious and, despite the undoubted importance, not very lively as a selection.

Out of the several lists that followed, I eventually saw that a number of books by British authors had a fair claim to have changed the world. Indeed it was difficult to cut down the number to 12 — James Clerk Maxwell, Tom Paine and Dr Johnson, for instance, were hard to omit. The British have produced and still do produce a high yield in key thoughts, inventions and proposals. By omitting the definite article — these are not the 12 books — I believed a case could be made for 12 books from these islands and that is what I try to do. The British provide a surprisingly rich crop.

From the beginning I wanted to enjoy a range. Leisure and literature would, if I could make it work, figure alongside science and the constitution; changes in society as well as changes in technology would be addressed. This has meant taking a risk and, now and then, elasticating the strict meaning of the word “book”.

For instance I thought it essential, given its key constitutional importance, to include Magna Carta which, though produced by the royal chancery in 1215 as a formal royal grant, became in effect a vital and enduring book of reference, the basic book of our constitution and that of many others, most importantly of America and India.

Certain books suggested themselves, most especially Newton’s Principia Mathematica (1687), Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776), Michael Faraday’s Experimental Researches in Electricity (1855) and William Tyndale’s massive contribution to the King James Bible (1611).

It was, I thought, impossible to ignore William Wilberforce’s successful campaign for the abolition of slavery. True, it began as a four-hour-long speech in the House of Commons in 1789, but it was reproduced in print immediately afterwards and it is in its book form that its revolutionary and lasting influence resides. Nor could the emergence of women as equals in every respect be neglected and in different ways Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and Marie Stopes’s Married Love (1918) spoke authoritatively and with far-reaching influence on that.

The arts could not be omitted, I thought, and nor could leisure. William Shakespeare’s posthumously published First Folio in 1623 will be argued for as a book that has ever since changed and reshaped minds. The first Book of Rules of Association Football (1863) enabled the world to play a game which now commands a unique and previously uncharted, unimagined empire of followers, participants, fanatics and rich merchants.

Which leaves the Patent Specification for Arkwright’s Spinning Machine (1769). I was being shown over his now-derelict mills in Derbyshire and learnt then how crucially important this invention was to an industrial revolution that has never stopped. This was made possible by a patent cunningly and skilfully put on paper by Richard Arkwright. A patent, I thought, could be called an entrepreneur-inventor’s book.

One of the people I spoke to when I was thinking about this list was my friend Howard Jacobson, the novelist. He was dismayed that it held no novelists. “I’m a novelist, you’re a novelist, we love novels, novels changed my life and novels changed your life, good novels change lives every day; a list without a novel? Without one, not one, novel?” A mild paraphrase: Howard on song can be rather more emphatic than that. (Shakespeare did not satisfy him.)

I defended the list I had drawn up. I said that I wanted books that I could prove had changed, rootedly, the lives of people all over the land — people on trains, people at airports, people in clubs and pubs, women who were still campaigning for equality and enjoying the long-awaited acknowledgment of their right to orgasm, men who week in week out played, watched, celebrated and discussed a game so beautifully and simply constructed it remains a masterpiece of socio-leisure architecture, those who hold religious truths to be self-evident and those whose conscious and unconscious lives have been readjusted by the revelations from the Galapagos Islands, the industrialists and financiers who ride and lubricate international capitalism calling on the market and free trade as its two true parents, those whose lives are devoted to seeking freedoms which were given such a lead in the abolition of the slave trade, those who go to the moon, put on the light, send a fax, vote in a democratic country, fight for their rights; those whose daily lives and the reach of whose minds and ambitions have been transformed by books which set off a shot that rang around the world. Or words to that effect.

So where, I had asked myself, in preparing this list, was Middlemarch? Bleak House? Women in Love? And for any passionate fiction reader, a list of novels could go on until the end of the book.

Yet that was one of the difficulties.

TWELVE BOOKS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD

Principia Mathematica (1687) by Isaac Newton

Married Love (1918) by Marie Stopes

Magna Carta (1215) by members of the English ruling classes

Book of Rules of Association Football (1863) by a group of former English public-school men

On the Origin of Species (1859) by Charles Darwin

On the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1789) by William Wilberforce in Parliament, immediately printed in several versions

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) by Mary Wollstonecraft

Experimental Researches in Electricity (three volumes, 1839, 1844, 1855) by Michael Faraday

Patent Specification for Arkwright’s Spinning Machine (1769) by Richard Arkwright

The King James Bible (1611) by William Tyndale and 54 scholars appointed by the king

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) by Adam Smith

The First Folio (1623) by William Shakespeare

At a minimum, scratch the soccer book--add Reflections on the Revolution by Edmund Burke. But really, once you've got Magna Carta, the King James Bible and Adam Smith, everything else is superfluous.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 1, 2006 12:00 AM