📚 Best Books

Books with best books on their catalogue record, first published between 1824 and 2001, ordered by how many editions are in print.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject best books in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print, out of the 2,251 works the catalogue holds under that subject. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	Literary taste	Arnold Bennett	1900	74
	Bücherkunde für Germanisten	Johannes Hansel	1959	26
	Die Massenpsychologie des Faschismus	Wilhelm Reich	1933	24
	The book-lover	James Baldwin	1884	20
	One hundred best books, with commentary and an essay on books and reading	John Cowper Powys	1922	16
	The choice of books	Charles F. Richardson	1880	14
	The Best Reading: Hints on the Selection of Books; on the Formation of Libraries, Public and ..	Frederic Beecher Perkins	1873	12
	Bibliotheca Lindesiana	James Ludovic Lindsay Earl of Crawford	1881	9
	Tools for theological research	John L. Sayre	1972	9
	An English library	F. Seymour Smith	1943	8
	"Signal" Selection of Children's Books	Nancy Chambers	1985	8
	The library companion	Thomas Frognall Dibdin	1824	7
	A course of English reading	James Pycroft	1845	7
	A manual of historical literature	Charles Kendall Adams	1882	7
	One hundred Dante books	John Cowper Powys	1916	7
	Reference books	Enoch Pratt Free Library.	1951	7
	References for literary workers	Henry Matson	1892	6
	Book selection	Bascom, Elva Lucile	1915	6
	I love books	John D. Snider	1942	6
	The lifetime reading plan	Clifton Fadiman	1960	6
	Good Reading	J. Sherwood Weber	1960	6
	"I'm looking for a book .."	Amy Loveman	1936	5
	A Lifetime's Reading	Philip Ward	1982	5
	Horror 100 Best Books	Stephen Jones	1988	5
	Old Testament commentary survey	Tremper Longman	1991	5
	The 100 most influential books ever written	Martin Seymour-Smith	1998	5
	Why read the classics?	Italo Calvino	1999	5
	The world's best books	Frank Parsons	1889	4
	The joy of reading	Charles Lincoln Van Doren	1985	4
	The 101 Best Graphic Novels	Stephen Weiner	2001	4

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 24 Oct 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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Want the ideas behind these books explained rather than listed? Try Study for short explainers, Academy for deeper tracks, and the periodic table or the night sky when the book is about matter or stars.