Ten ways to begin.
Every volume belongs to a shelf, and every shelf has its own ornament, drawn for it and used in no other. 579 volumes so far.
Series I · 170 volumes
Literary Classics
The novels that made the novel.
The central shelf of the Library: the novels that taught fiction how to hold a whole society in view and still follow one person through it. Drawing rooms and boarding houses, provincial towns and capital cities, and the slow discovery that a life is decided by things too small to notice at the time. Each newly set, in present-day American spelling.
All 170 volumes
Series II · 148 volumes
Adventure & the Sea
Wide horizons and long odds.
The ship that does not come back, the map with a cross on it, the man who walks out of a comfortable life and into weather. Adventure was the nineteenth century’s most popular literature and remains its most underrated — these books move because their authors knew exactly how much to withhold.
All 148 volumes
Series III · 63 volumes
Mystery & Crime
The pattern every mystery still follows.
The locked room, the impossible alibi, the detective who sees what the police cannot. Everything the genre does today was invented here, usually in a single decade, and usually better than the imitations that followed. Each edition is complete and newly set in modern English.
All 63 volumes
Series IV · 53 volumes
Love & Society
Courtship, consequence and the long view.
The marriage plot was never only about marriage: it was the sharpest instrument the age had for examining money, class, and the narrow room a woman was given in which to decide her own life. These novels are far tougher-minded than their reputation suggests.
All 53 volumes
Series V · 49 volumes
Salon & Steppe
The Russian and continental masters.
From the drawing rooms of Petersburg to the open country beyond them: the literature that put the largest possible questions — guilt, faith, freedom, what a person owes another person — inside ordinary domestic lives, and refused to make any of it comfortable.
All 49 volumes
Series VI · 40 volumes
Gothic & Horror
Dread, and the architecture of it.
The laboratory and the locked room, the portrait that will not stay still, the creature made and then abandoned. Gothic literature gave the world its lasting images of dread — and remains far stranger, and far more humane, than the century of imitation that followed it.
All 40 volumes
Series · 31 volumes
Comedy & Satire
The century laughing at itself.
Satire keeps better than almost anything else in literature, because the vanities it goes after have not changed: the self-important clerk, the improving pamphlet, the man entirely certain he is the hero of the story. These books are still funny, which is the hard part.
All 31 volumes
Series · 19 volumes
Science Fiction
The future, as it was first imagined.
Before science fiction had a name it had questions: what happens to us as the machines advance, and what will we have become when the far future finally arrives? The scientific romances asked them first, and asked them more sharply than most of what came after.
All 19 volumes
Series · 6 volumes
Essays & Criticism
Thinking in public.
The prose written to argue rather than to tell a story: essays, criticism, and the long personal reflection. The shortest shelf in the Library and the one that most repays a slow reader.
All 6 volumes
