Canon of Humanity ebooks
Sometime ago I went on a project of compiling a list of all the great and notable books of humankind, starting from the early days onwards. I didn't cover much of the later parts of the 20th century as legally free ebooks (that are out of copyright) are comparatively few: also, there are far more books to cover and not so much of a cohesive canon! This could be attempted at some point however. (I am going to stop at 1922, as books published before 1923 in the United States are typically out of copyright. In the European Union, and Canada, texts written published by authors in their lifetimes and before 1946, are generally out of copyright.
This post I will call the Library of Alexandria edition, part I, because I will list books written/"published" before 1BC/1AD. I have only typed up a list so far at the moment:I intend to come back to this at some point and insert links to wiki-pages as well as to where free ebooks can be found.
Some notes:
Especially with early books, I have had to give approximate dates to works, generally quite conservative. I liked to give a reasonable date for which a work is likely to have existed largely in the form by which it is known today. Sometimes this means an approximation within one or two centuries or decades. In some cases, I have put the "publication" date as the year of the author's death, typically because the work was not published in the author's lifetime and because I don't really like the idea of a posthumous date (if it's on the page, it's in the ether, is essentially my view). I have recorded some works as being by the great authors "Anonymous" or "Unknown" in some cases that may prove controversial with some people: "Anonymous" generally if I accept that the identity of the author is essentially mythological or unknowable, perhaps written by a school of people or a team of editors (in some cases, the texts are commonly accepted as written by different authors); "Unknown" means that there is, theoretically, a prospect of the author of a work being determined at some point in the future.
As to genres, they are quite bulky and perhaps a little inconsistent: some more accurate description and/or some more nuances could be attempted. (With "Religious" books, although I have dated them, I didn't like to give genre descriptions relating to broad time periods and cultures as with many of the other books). I mostly derived the genres from goodreads, and modified them slightly.
Some of the works in this table are in peculiar packages: this is derived from a particular ebook I found.
With wikisource links, it is possible to compile the pages together into a pdf or epub file: this is a little tedious (depending on the exact rules they have, I (or maybe so else could) distribute my own copies of such files via this thread).
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Originally Posted by bg
