Library Thing’s’Dead People’s Books’
Any sane writer with a rare chance to tour a literary hero’s estate is going to sneak a hungry peek at the bookshelves. In few other places—among the polished chairs, antique vases and other stuffy artifacts—can you find such an authentic portal into the writing mind.
Any sane writer with a rare chance to tour a literary hero’s estate is going to sneak a hungry peek at the bookshelves. In few other places—among the polished chairs, antique vases and other stuffy artifacts—can you find such an authentic portal into the writing mind. What insights might we gain by seeing that James Bond creator Ian Fleming was a fan of Freud? Or that Darwin dug the more obscure works of Alexander Graham Bell (Memoir Upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race, anyone)?
At LibraryThing (librarything.com), tagged as “the world’s largest book club,” users can post their personal libraries online and connect with people who like the same books. Among them, a project titled “I See Dead People’s Books” gives you access to the personal libraries of notable figures ranging from Ernest Hemingway to Tupac Shakur.
We introduce our new InkWell feature by spotlighting selections from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stash of 322 books:
• Dubliners by James Joyce, 1922
• The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad, 1919 (inscribed by Zelda Sayre, and with two portraits in pencil)
• Beginners’ French Conversation by Jules Helein, 1921
• The Captive by Marcel Proust, 1929 (Fitzgerald’s copy with manuscript annotations)
• Der Grosse Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1928
• Esquire, Autumn 1933 to May 1934. Vol. I
• Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx, 1937
• Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson, 1919
• Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, 1925
• North of Boston by Robert Frost, 1916
• The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, 1915
• Save Me the Waltz by Zelda Fitzgerald, 1932
• Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll, 1905
• The Trial and Death of Socrates; Being the Euthyphron, Apology, Crito and Phædo of Plato by Plato, 1910
• The Witch-Cult in Western Europe; a Study in Anthropology by Margaret Alice Murray, 1921
• Works by Edgar Allan Poe, 1881
• Where Paris Dines: With Information About Restaurants of All Kinds, Costly and Cheap, Dignified and Gay, Known and Litt by Julian Street, 1929
