which is by way of being a list of those books on my shelves that i just couldn’t do without, a notion i came across at the end of Alberto Manguel’s The Libraries of Night, that seemed such a good idea i couldn’t resist doing it myself. Manguel’s Dictionary of Imaginary Places should also appear below but, seeing as this was his idea, it gets its spot up at the top.
| anthology | The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry |
| anthology | The Harvill Book of 20th Century Poetry in English |
| anthology | World Poetry (Norton) |
| anthology | Poems of Arab Andalusia |
| anthology | An Leabhar Mor (The Great Book of Gaelic) |
| Atwood, Margaret | Eating Fire |
| Bachelard, Gaston | The Poetics of Space |
| Barnes, Robert D | Invertebrate Zoology |
| Barthes, Roland | A Reader |
| Berger, John | Photocopies |
| Betjeman, John | Collected Poems |
| Borges, Jorge Luis | Collected Works |
| Borowski, Tadeusz | This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen |
| Brereton, Geoffrey (ed) | The Penguin Book of French Verse 16th – 18th centuries |
| Brown. George Mackay | Greenvoe |
| Burroughs, William | The Western Lands |
| Calvino, Italo | If on a winter’s night a traveller |
| Calvino, Italo | Invisible Cities |
| Capek, Karel | War with the Newts |
| Carver, Raymond | All of Us |
| Celan, Paul | Collected Poems |
| Clark. Susanna | Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrel |
| Conrad, Peter | Modern Times, Modern Places |
| Crawford, Robert | Scotland’s Books |
| Cutler, Ivor | Glasgow Dreamer (illustrated by Martin Honeysett) |
| Eliot, George | Middlemarch |
| Fournel, Paul | Need for Bike |
| Galeano, Eduardo | Mirrors |
| Gibbon, Lewis Crassic | A Scots Quair |
| Gombrich, E. H. | The Story of Art |
| Gorky, Maxim | My Childhood |
| Grant, John | Littlenose the Hunter |
| Graves, Robert | Goodbye to All That |
| Gray, Alasdair | Lanark |
| Hoffman, Yoel (ed) | Japanese Death Poems |
| Hogg, James | The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner |
| Holmes, Richard | The Age of Wonder |
| Homer | The Odyssey |
| Hughes, Robert | American Visions |
| Krabbé Tim | The Rider |
| La Rochefoucauld | Maxims |
| Lambourne, Lionel | Victorian Painting |
| Lee, Harper | To Kill a Mockingbird |
| Levi, Primo | If This be a Man/ The Truce |
| Lightman, Alan | Einstein’s Dreams |
| London, Jack | White Fang |
| Lowell. Robert | Imitations |
| Mabey, Richard | Flora Britannica |
| Mak, Geert | In Europe |
| Maxwell, Robert | Time Will Darken It |
| McCaig, Norman | Collected Poems |
| Melville, Herman | Moby Dick |
| Neruda, Pablo | Canto General |
| Ninh, Bao | The Sorrow of War |
| Paz, Octavio | Collected Poems |
| Rawley, Donald | The Night Bird Cantata and other stories |
| Remarque, Erich Maria | All Quiet on the Western Front |
| Rilke, Rainer Maria | Complete Poems |
| Ross, Alex | The Rest is Noise |
| Schama, Simon | Citizens |
| Sexton, Anne | Complete Poems |
| Shelley, Mary | Frankenstein |
| Shelton, Gilbert | Complete Fat Freddy’s Cat/Freak Brothers |
| Sienkiewicz, Bill | Moby Dick |
| Somerset Maugham, William | Cakes and Ale |
| Somerset Maugham, William | The Razor’s Edge |
| Spark, Muriel | The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie |
| Verlaine, Paul | Selected Poems |
| Warner, Marina | No Go the Bogeyman |
| White, Kenneth | Open World |
| Whitman, Walt | Leaves of Grass |
| Zola, Emile | L’assommoir |
