📚 Courtesy

The smaller sibling of etiquette, treated seriously: the everyday politeness literature and its social function.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject courtesy in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. 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
	Letters to his son	Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield	1774	114
	Talk to the Hand- The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door	Lynne Truss	2005	17
	The gentleman's calling	Allestree, Richard	1660	16
	Galateo	Giovanni Della Casa	2013	15
	Peacham's Compleat Gentleman, 1634	Peacham, Henry	1906	12
	Communication in a Civil Society	John Gooch	2013	10
	A children's book about being mean	Joy Berry	1988	9
	The No Asshole Rule	Robert I. Sutton	2007	8
	Manners	Aliki	1990	7
	What Will He Do with it, Part Two	Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron Lytton	2004	6
	Civility in Politics and Education	Deborah Mower	2013	6
	Choosing Civility	P. M. Forni	1957	5
	What Will He Do with it, Part One	Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron Lytton	2004	5
	Incivility	Philip Smith	2006	5
	Peas Queues The Minefield Of Modern Manners	Sandi Toksvig	2013	5
	Mobilizing Hospitality	Sarah Gibson	2016	5
	Nouveau traité de la civilité	Antoine de Courtin	1724	4
	The character of the gentleman	Francis Lieber	1846	4
	Good morals and gentle manners	Alexander M. Gow	1873	4
	The polite pupil; for the use of Catholic parochial and high schools	Marianists.	1905	4
	La courtoisie au moyen âge	Henri Dupin	1931	4
	The art of thank you	Connie Leas	2002	4
	Women, Men and Politeness	Holmes, Janet	2013	4
	Good manners for nice people who sometimes say f*ck	Amy Alkon	2014	4
	Critique of Politeness Theory	Gino Eelen	2014	4
	The book of good manners	Florence Kingsland	1912	3
	Talosophy, the science of harmony	William Vernon Backus	1913	3
	El caballero perfecto	Alonso Jerónimo de Salas Barbadillo	1949	3
	A word in a pig's ear	Nick Ward	1999	3
	Recueil de complimens, selon l'usuage le plus nouveau qui se pratique parmi le beaumonde =	Antoine de Courtin	1722	2

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 03 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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