📚 Characters and Characteristics

Books with characters and characteristics on their catalogue record, first published between 1628 and 2016, ordered by how many editions are in print.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject characters and characteristics in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print, out of the 4,496 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
	Menschenkenntnis	Alfred Adler	1927	64
	Characters of Shakespear's plays	William Hazlitt	1817	47
	Les caractères	Jean de La Bruyère	1872	39
	How to Analyze People on Sight	Elsie Lincoln Benedict	2011	38
	Micro-cosmographie	John Earle	1628	35
	Psychologische Typen	Carl Gustav Jung	1921	31
	Ten Boys from Dickens	Kate Dickinson Sweetser	1901	29
	The Blank Slate	Steven Pinker	2002	24
	The English comic characters	J. B. Priestley	1925	21
	Opus posthumous	Wallace Stevens	1957	17
	Les caracteres de Theophraste	Jean de La Bruyère	1688	12
	Le romancier et ses personnages	François Mauriac	1933	11
	Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times	Anthony Ashley Cooper Shaftesbury	1723	10
	English eccentrics	Edith Dame Sitwell	1933	10
	Yuganta	Karve, Irawati Karmarkar	1967	10
	English eccentrics and eccentricities	John Timbs	1866	8
	The wonders of the little world	Nathaniel Wanley	1678	7
	How to analyze people on sight through the science of human analysis	Elsie Lincoln Benedict	1921	7
	Analyzing Character	Katherine M. Huntsinger Blackford	1922	7
	Pattern and growth in personality	Gordon W. Allport	1961	7
	Personality	Gordon W. Allport	1937	6
	Caractère et personnalité	Gaston Berger	1956	6
	Les excentriques	Champfleury	1852	5
	Gifts differing	Isabel Briggs Myers	1980	5
	Jacqueline Wilson Quiz Book	Jacqueline Wilson	2005	5
	Snape	Lorrie Kim	2016	5
	Truth	Susan Batson	2005	4
	Lectures on Jung's typology	Marie-Louise von Franz	1979	3
	A treatise on zodiacal physiognomy	Varley, John	1828	2
	The art of inventing characters	Georges Polti	1922	2

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.