📚 Manuscripts

30 works · ordered by editions in print

Books before print: codices, palimpsests, and the catalogues that describe what survived.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject manuscripts 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.

Title	Author	First published	Editions
Der Antichrist	Friedrich Nietzsche	1895	385
Poems	William Wordsworth	1807	372
An essay on man	Alexander Pope	1733	315
Poems	Samuel Taylor Coleridge	1796	232
Proserpine & Midas	Mary Shelley	1922	172
Rubāʻīyāt	Omar Khayyam	1870	151
The Roman Breviary	Catholic Church	1200	140
Poems	William Butler Yeats	1895	135
Roman de la Rose	Guillaume de Lorris	1493	93
Poems	Geoffrey Chaucer	1800	86
The Doctor's Dilemma	George Bernard Shaw	1911	70
The hour-glass	William Butler Yeats	1903	66
Az ember tragédiája	Imre Madách	1897	60
Songs of innocence and of experience	William Blake	1794	52
Sämtliche Werke	Friedrich Hölderlin	1913	52
Pontificale romanum	Catholic Church	1497	49
Poems	César Vallejo	1962	49
Convivio	Dante Alighieri	1490	44
Der arme Heinrich	Hartmann von Aue	1872	38
Brief an den Vater	Franz Kafka	1953	37
You Never Can Tell	George Bernard Shaw	1906	36
The marriage of Heaven and Hell	William Blake	1793	34
Western manuscripts and miniatures	Sotheby & Co. (London, England)	1985	27
Happy days	Samuel Beckett	1961	23
Misquoting Jesus	Bart D. Ehrman	2005	21
Palaeographia sacra pictoria; or, select illustrations of ancient illuminated biblical and theological manuscripts	John Obadiah Westwood	1843	18
Iter Italicum	Paul Oskar Kristeller	1963	18
The great pianists	Harold C. Schonberg	1962	8
Codices illustres	Ingo F. Walther	2001	6
Insomnia	Henry Miller	1970	5

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 03 Nov 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.