Finding Those 1001 Books

Many of the 1294 books listed in the three editions of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die are out of print, and many of those are difficult to find for various reasons. Having spent a lot of time searching for them myself, I thought I would share the fruits of that experience with those who are just starting to build their collections. The most practical way to do this seemed to be to build a LibraryThing Wiki page, which you will find here:

http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/1001_Books:_Finding_Aid

There is still much to be done--I need to add some cross-references for double surnames and provide links to work and author pages, but hopefully what's there already will be of some benefit.

Wiki pages are open to everyone to edit, so you can make your own entries. If you do so, please follow the current format to avoid confusion. If you want to share a different type of information, such as lists by genre or nationality, it would be better to do that on another Wiki page. If you have information to share and aren't comfortable editing the Wiki, just post it here in this discussion topic and I or someone else who knows how to will make the update.

Impressive!

Wow, what a great resource! Thanks for sharing all your hard work.

Awesome resource, thanks so much for this!

Thanks so much for all your hard work!

Amazing... thanks so much for putting this together!

This is wonderful. Thanks for taking the time to help the rest of us!!

Wow! This is absolutely amazing - thank you for doing this! And I already found I made an error in my reading - having read Brechts's Threepenny Opera instead of the novel.

ah goody goody steven... once we get as high as y ou have on the list, this will come in very handy. I'm secretly hoping that by the time I get really desperate the advent of e-books will have meant that many titles will be back in "print"... we shall see if that comes true or not.

Thank you so much for this! It is wonderful!

Thanks, everyone. I'm glad so many of you will be getting some use out of it.

I've done the cross references and am now starting to add links to author and work pages. This is rather tedious as there are no automatic touchstones in Wikis as there are here in Talk pages. I'm trying to do at least one alpha section per day.

And thank you arukiyomi for being the first to help out by making your own contribution to the Wiki.

This is so helpful - thank you for all your hard work!

ah... wondered why a touchstone wouldn't work. No worries Steven... I can't promise I'll do much but where I can I will.

Recent news and updates:

High-Rise by J. G. Ballard has been reprinted and is now available in print and as an ebook.

A new and less expensive edition of The Passion According to G. H. by Clarice Lispector has been released.

The Commandant by Jessica Anderson is now available as a Kindle ebook.

The Old Man and the Sea is now available as a FREE ebook from Project Gutenberg Canada

Inland by Gerald Murnane is being released by Dalkey Archive Press on July 3.

The People of Hemsö by August Strindberg is being published in October by Norvik Press

The Forbidden Realm by J. J. Slauerhoff will be published for the first time in English translation early next year by Pushkin Press.

I've also updated the Finding Aid Wiki to show that Disobedience by Alberto Moravia can also be found as "Luca" in the collection Two Adolescents.

brilliant!

Great resource!!!

I just wanted to add my thanks. This is a wonderful resource.

More updates:

Caught by Henry Green, long out of print, has just been published as an ebook and is available from Amazon.

Transit by Anna Seghers will be released May 7 in both print and ebook format by NYRB Classics

The Stechlin by Theodor Fontane will be published in English translation on August 1 of this year. The ISBN is 1571135731.

I have made a few other minor updates to the finding aid wiki page.

Thanks Steven, this is really very helpful!

Thank you so much!!

The Stechlin is now available and shipping in English translation from Amazon US. Unfortunately the price is $39.95 list, $30.13 online -- a lot to pay for a paperback.

The 1995 Camden House edition of The Stechlin is also available as a free ebook:
http://archive.org/details/derstechlinroma00fontgoog

Nevermind.

The record appears to be a little mixed up. It says it is the 1995 US edition, but the links all bring up the text of an 1899 German edition. Did you find an English text online?

>24 StevenTX: Oops, apparently not. I initially found it on the B&N site (I own a nook) and assumed the info stating it was a google scan of the 1995 edition was correct. I hadn't checked the actual epub (or the one posted in the link above).

Why don't we all chip in and buy a group copy of the Stechlin which we forward to each other around the world in perpetuity as it becomes more and more dog-eared ;-)

Here is some important information on The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist by Robert Tressell, first published 100 years ago.

The author died before his book was published, and publishers made drastic cuts to it before publishing it in 1914. A second edition in 1918 was even further abridged. The complete, unabridged novel was not published until 1955.

The 1914 edition is available as a free e-book, and reading it will "tick the box" as far as the 1001 Books list is concerned because that's the edition they cite in the list. But if you want to read what Tressell intended, you'll have to purchase or borrow one of the current print or electronic editions. Both the Oxford World's Classics edition of 2009 and the Wordsworth Classics edition of 2012 use the full restored text. The Wordsworth edition is available as an e-book. (There was also a Penguin edition of 2004, but it is now out of print.)

   

As the finding aid says, Ficciones and Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges overlap. If you've read Ficciones, to read everything in Labyrinths you have to read the section in Labyrinths past "The Sect of the Phoenix."

If you've read Labyrinths, to read everything in Ficciones you must read "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim," "An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain," "The End," and "The South".

If you read Ficciones and The Aleph, you've read everything in Labyrinths.

Everything in Labyrinths is in Collected Fictions. I went down the table of contents and I don't know why the finding aid says otherwise. If in Collected Fictions you read the three sections "Garden of the Forking Paths", "Artifices", and "The Aleph", you've read Labyrinths.. Nope... there are extra essays.

I may be mistaken, but Labyrinths has 10 essays (at least my copy did), which are not in Collected Fictions. For example, the essay "The Argentine Writer and Tradition."

It also has a section titled "Parables," but these are in Collected Fictions in the section titled "The Maker."

While this thread is top of the pile I thought I'd let you know that all four volumes of Parade's End are available as free ebooks from ebooks.adelaide.edu.au. This website from the University of Adelaide Library is a good source of free ebooks and is updated regularly (though not for the last few months).

No, I am mistaken, I was using the table of contents on Wikipedia. There are indeed extra essays. Good to be corrected.

Would this be a good place to post when we notice a book on the list is on sale as an ebook? I'm regularly seeing one or more the books on sale to 1.99 or free on Amazon and was thinking about maybe starting a thread where we could share when we find them free - would this be a better place to do it?

I would be interested in that information (at the risk of getting etail spam posted, and at the risk of adding to my impossibly large tbr pile).

Maybe it would be best to have the details in a new thread as this one is more about locating difficult to find/confusing books. The only reason I flagged the ebooks for Parade's End above was that SteveTXs wiki notes that only three of the four are available from Gutenberg Australia.

#30 - I've updated the wiki. Thanks for the information.

I didn't initially intend to use the Wiki to steer people to free e-books, though there's no reason we can't use it (or a separate one) for that. The great majority of pre-1923 books are free in some form, somewhere. I made an exception with Parade's End lest people think by downloading all three volumes on PG-A they had the whole work.

#32 - That's a good idea. It's fine with me if you use this thread or start another one. I've also thought about sharing such information when I see it.

#33 - Just a reminder that it's not just "my" wiki. Anyone can edit it, and you are welcome to do so. All I ask is that you stick to the purpose for which it was intended and keep it pretty. :-)

When this weekend comes and I get some free time, I'll go ahead and set up a thread. I certainly don't mind rubbing it, updating the first post to show what's free/cheap that day, etc., and several sets of eyes should help us all get in on the deals!

33 - I already have a bookcase at home and a shelf here at college of unread list paperbacks and hardcovers, but who can resist stockpiling up all these cheap and free ebooks! It's just the hoarder in me, what can I say...which makes me think maybe I should start a thread to share pictures of our stashes sometime, hmmm.

I think a separate thread is good as there are many of us who don't read on Kindles but use other ereader hardware.

Yeah definitely a separate thread please, as it's not the same purpose as this one.

I found that Oroonoko is available in The Works of Aphra Behn Volume V on Project Gutenberg. Here is the link - http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29854

Ormond is in Tales and Novels — Volume 09 by Maria Edgeworth here: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9107

Doing some updating of my available ebooks, so I may have more!

A new English translation is underway for The Last Days of Mankind by Karl Kraus. It will be published in three volumes. The first has already been released in paperback and as an e-book. The other two volumes are scheduled to be published November 2014 and November 2016. Here is the translator/publisher's website:

http://www.forgottencitiespress.com/

And the listing on Amazon US:

http://www.amazon.com/Last-Days-Mankind-Night-ebook/dp/B00JVRRF7Y/ref=sr_1_1?ie=...

I note that there is now a full English translation of The Last Days of Mankind (translated by Bridgham and Timms, and published in November 2015). It is available from BookDepository and no doubt other book sellers.

In StevenTX's absence I have updated the Wiki page.

thanks puckers!

Just to note that Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Ragazzi has recently been published in paperback by Europa editions as The Street Kids. I would update the wiki but my skills don't extend to adding authors to StevenTX's excellent guide.

>47 good to know. I collect Europa Editions, so I'll look for that one.

Thank you, very helpful!