A chronological survey of the world's most influential books. 

Many books have become classics, must-reads or overnight publishing sensations, but how many can genuinely claim to have changed the way we see and think?

In 100 Books that Changed the World, authors Scott Christianson and Colin Salter bring together an exceptional collection of truly groundbreaking books - from scriptures that founded religions, to scientific treatises that challenged beliefs, to novels that kick-started literary genres. This elegantly designed book offers a chronological survey of the most important books from around the globe, from the earliest illuminated manuscripts to the age of the ebook publication.

Introduction 10
I Ching 14
The Epic of Gilgamesh 16
Torah 18
The Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer 20
Aesop's Fables 22
The Art of War, Sun Tzu 24
The Analects of Confucius 26
Kama Sutra, Vatsyayana 28
The Republic, Plato 30
Elements of Geometry, Euclid 32
De Architectura, Vitruvius 34
Naturalis Historia, Pliny the Elder 36
The Quran 38
Arabian Knights 40
The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu 42
The Divine Comedy, Dante 44
The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer 46
Gutenberg Bible 48
The Prince, Machiavelli 50
On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Nicolaus Copernicus 52
Lives of the Artists, Vasari 54
The Prophecies, Nostradamus 56
Don Quixote, Cervantes 58
King James Bible 60
Shakespeare's First Folio 62
Micrographia, Robert Hooke 64
Paradise Lost, John Milton 66
Samuel Pepys's Diary 68
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Isaac Newton 70
Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift 72
Species Plantarum, Carl Linnaeus 74
Samuel Johnson's Dictionary 76
The Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole 78
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon 80
The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith 82
Rights of Man, Thomas Paine 84
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft 86
Grimm's Fairy Tales 88
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen 90
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley 92
Procedure for Writing Words, Music and Plainsong in dots, Louis Braille 94
Murray's Handbooks for Travellers 96
The Pencil of Nature, William Henry Fox Talbot 98
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass 100
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë 102
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens 104
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville 106
Roget's Thesaurus 108
Walden, Henry David Thoreau 110
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert 112
Gray's Anatomy 114
On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin 116
Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management 118
Les Miserables, Victor Hugo 120
Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Jules Verne 112
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll 124
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky 126
Das Kapital, Karl Marx 128
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy 130
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain 132
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde 134
The Time Machine, H.G. Wells 136
The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud 138
Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust 140
The Origin of Continents and Oceans, Alfred Wegener 142
Relativity: The Special and General Theory, Albert Einstein 144
Ulysses, James Joyce 146
The Trial, Franz Kafka 148
The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Walter Y. Evans-Wentz 150
Lady Chatterley's Lover, D.H. Lawrence 152
All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque 154
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes 156
How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie 158
Dr Spock's Baby and Child Care 160
The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank 162
Kinsey Reports 164
1984, George Orwell 166
The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir 168
A Book of Mediterranean Food, Elizabeth David 170
The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley 172
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov 174
The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien 176
On the Road, Jack Kerouac 178
The Cat in the Hat, Dr. Seuss 180
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe 182
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee 184
Silent Spring, Rachel Carson 186
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn 188
The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan 190
Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung 192
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez 194
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou 196
Ways of Seeing, John Berger 198
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig 200
A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking 202
The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie 204
Maus, Art Spiegelman 206
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling 208
Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty 210
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, Naomi Klein 212
Acknowledgements 215
Index 219
 

Scott Christianson (1947-2017) was a prize-winning author. His books included 100 Diagrams That Changed the World and Freeing Charles: The Epic Struggle to Free a Slave on the Eve of the Civil War. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Village Voice, and Newsday.
Colin Salter is a prolific author of literary history. For Batsford he has written 100 Books that Changed the World, 100 Letters that Changed the World and 100 Speeches that Changed the World. He is the author of a biography of Mark Twain and a history of the books in one family's three-hundred-year-old library. He lives in Edinburgh with his wife, dog and bicycle.