Pour une Bibliotheque Ideale

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In the early 1950s Raymond Queneau asked several dozen French (or living in France) authors and critics to list the hundred books they would choose if they had to limit themselves to that number. He reproduced all their responses in the book Pour une Bibliothèque Idéale (Gallimard, 1956), along with the overall top 100 list reproduced bellow.
The list of respondents can be seen at
http://web.archive.org/web/20010223073820/w3.tvi.cc.nm.us/~rswigg/BIAuthorsPolled.html
I’m not sure if all of them have a list in the book, or just an answer explaining why they did not vote.
On the above page you can also find a link to Queneau’s own list.

Two more individual lists from the book are also online
Henry Miller’s:
http://web.archive.org/web/20001021225726/literarycritic.com/miller.htm
and Marianne Moore’s:
http://web.archive.org/web/20001022025805/literarycritic.com/moore1.htm

Other famous names include Jean Anouilh, Andre Breton, Paul Claudel (the only one who had a book included in the overall top 100), Jean Cocteau, Paul Eluard, and Georges Simenon.

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  1. 51.
    Alice in Wonderland
    by Lewis Carroll

    Drag me to re-order


  2. 52.
    Comedies and Proverbs (PAJ Books)
    by Alfred de Musset

    Drag me to re-order


  3. 53.
    The Journal of Jules Renard
    by Jules Renard

    Drag me to re-order


  4. 54.
    Illiad
    by Homer

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  5. 55.
    The Idiot
    by Fyodor Dostoevsky

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  6. 56.
    Wuthering Heights
    by Emily Brontë

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  7. 57.
    The Possessed: The Devils
    by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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  8. 58.
    ?
    The Complete Tales of Voltaire
    by Voltaire

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  9. 59.
    The Complete Poems (Penguin Classics)
    by William Blake

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  10. 60.
    Crime and Punishment
    by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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  11. 61.
    Greek and Roman Lives (Giant Thrifts)
    by Plutarch

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  12. 62.
    The Princess of Cleves
    by Madame de Lafayette

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  13. 63.
    Das Kapital, Gateway Edition
    by Karl Marx

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  14. 64.
    Adolphe (Penguin Classics)
    by Benjamin Constant

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  15. 66.
    Les Tragiques
    by Agrippa d' Aubigné

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  16. 67.
    Les destinées: Poèmes philosophiques (Lettres françaises)
    by Alfred de Vigny

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  17. 68.
    The Collected Poems: A Bilingual Edition (Revised)
    by Federico Garcia Lorca

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  18. 69.
    Man's Fate (La Condition Humaine)
    by Andre Malraux

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  19. 70.
    La Rochefoucauld Maxims
    by La Rochefoucauld

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  20. 71.
    The Characters Of Jean De La Bruyere
    by Jean De La Bruyere

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  21. 72.
    Sevigne: Selected Letters (Penguin Classics)
    by Madame de Sevigne

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  22. 73.
    ?
    Dictionnaire de la langue française
    by Emile Littré

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  23. 74.
    Ubu Roi (Dover Thrift Editions)
    by Alfred Jarry

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  24. 75.
    ?
    Poems ( The Collected Works of Paul Valery Volume 1 )
    by Valery Paul

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  25. 76.
    The Provincial Letters
    by Blaise Pascal

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  26. 77.
    Seven Pillars of Wisdom
    by T.E. Lawrence

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  27. 78.
    Carmen and Other Stories (World's Classics)
    by Prosper Merimee

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  28. 79.
    Selected Writings of Paul Valery
    by Paul Valery

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  29. 80.
    Fragments (Penguin Classics)
    by Heraclitus

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  30. 81.
    Marivaux Plays (Methuen's World Dramatists)
    by Pierre Marivaux

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  31. 82.
    La Légende des siècles
    by Victor Hugo

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  32. 83.
    The Trial
    by Franz Kafka

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  33. 85.
    Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War (1913-1916)
    by Guillaume Apollinaire

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  34. 86.
    Journals: 1889-1913
    by Andre Gide

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  35. 88.
    The Three Musketeers
    by Alexandre Dumas père

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  36. 89.
    History of My Life (Everyman's Library (Cloth))
    by Giacomo Casanova

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  37. 90.

  38. 91.
    Lord Jim
    by Joseph Conrad

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  39. 92.
    ?

  40. 93.
    Thus Spake Zarathustra
    by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

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  41. 94.
    ?
    Three Plays
    by Paul Claudel

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  42. 95.
    Wry-Blue Loves : Les Amours jaunes
    by Tristan Corbiere

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  43. 96.
    Les Contemplations
    by Victor Hugo

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  44. 97.
    Dark Night of the Soul
    by John of the Cross

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  45. 98.
    Dead Souls
    by Nikolai Gogol

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  46. 99.
    The Aeneid: Virgil
    by Virgil

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  47. 100.
    The Diary of a Country Priest: A Novel
    by Georges Bernanos

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Created by frbrown on Oct 10, 2008.
 

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