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A UK high street bookseller has sparked a literary debate by listing its ‘50 Books that Shaped the World’. Book experts at Blackwells have taken on the huge task of selecting which notable books produced across the centuries and the globe have most influenced how we live and think in the modern world.

Celebrated works of literature, science, religion, philosophy and more have all made a list which is intended to bring the books to a wider audience, to challenge perceptions and provoke debate.

The Bible, The Qur’an, The Joy of Sex, Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management and The Domesday Book have been chosen along with the writings of Confucius, the sketchbooks of the original ‘Renaissance Man’ Leonardo Da Vinci, peacemaker Gandhi and would-be world dictator Adolf Hitler. Alongside these authors the list sees the poets and novelists TS Eliot, DH Lawrence, futurist Aldous Huxley, Solzhenitsyn and Salman Rushdie line-up among a diverse list of those who have put pen to paper and finger to keyboard and altered the world we live in.

Wider Public

Phill Jamieson for Blackwell said: “We believe it's really important to bring books like the 50 we have selected to the attention of a wider public. Too often bookshops promote just the latest releases, we have taken the lead in bringing important classics such as these to the front of people’s minds.”

The full list (in alphabetical order, by author) shapes up as follows:

The Qur'an

Jonathan Livingston Seagull - A Story by Richard Bach

The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir

Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management by Isabella Beeton

Ways of Seeing by John Berger

The Bible

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

The Joy of Sex by Alex Comfort

The Analects by Confucius

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci by Leonardo Da Vinci

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (AKA The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life) by Charles Darwin

Domesday Book

The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot

The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon

The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud

An Autobiography (AKA The Story of My Experiments with Truth) by Mohandas K. Gandhi

The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer

Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler

Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes

The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change by Robert Hughes

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Dr Johnson's Dictionary by Samuel Johnson

Ulysses by James Joyce

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

Tao Te Ching (AKA The Book of the Way) by Lao-Tzu

Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence

Not on the Label: What Really Goes into the Food on Your Plate by Felicity Lawrence

If This Is a Man by Primo Levi

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

On Liberty and Other Essays by John Stuart Mill

Utopia by Thomas More

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

The Rights of Man, Common Sense and Other Political Writings by Thomas Paine

The Republic by Plato

The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
Orientalism (AKA Western Conceptions of the Orient) by Edward W. Said

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger

Being and Nothingness (AKA An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology) by Jean-Paul Sartre

The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston (Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer) by Siegfried Sassoon

The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn

Married Love by Marie Stopes

Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft

How many have you read?

At Newcastle’s Blackwell branch, manager Andrew Lilley added: “Any book can shape your life if it's something that touches you on a personal level. Books can entertain and educate - if you read the right book at the right time it can truly become part of your life. Not all books will shape the world but a good book can shape your world.”

The public is being encouraged to join in the debate and name what book they think shaped the world and why. Book lovers can enter an in-store competition at Blackwell’s stores, as well as an online competition to win copies of books from the big list on Blackwell’s website at: www.bookshop.blackwell.co.uk

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