Top Titles in Library Collections
OCLC has a list of the top titles owned by member libraries. They call it a top-1000 list, but it's actually 1001 -- but who's counting? Here are the top 25:
1. The Holy Bible(Via Stephen Carlson.)
2. The Census
3. Mother Goose
4. The Divine Comedy
5. The Odyssey
6. The Iliad
7. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
8. The Lord of the Rings
9. Hamlet
10. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
11. Don Quixote
12. Beowulf
13. The Koran
14. The Night Before Christmas
15. Garfield
16. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
17. Aesop's Fables
18. Arabian Nights
19. Macbeth
20. Gulliver's Travels
21. Robinson Crusoe
22. Romeo and Juliet
23. The Bhagavadgita
24. A Christmas Carol
25. The Canterbury Tales
posted by Loren Rosson III @ 3/23/2007
2 Comments:
Just a light-hearted comment: Calling the Bible the "Holy Bible" is at once both disconcerting and offputting. Disconcerting because one feels like saying "Is there another Bible? An unholy one?" Offputting because it's very much like advertising "delicious hamburgers". One feels like saying "Thank you very much, but I'll be the judge of that."
Gee, you noticed. If the Bible is holy, why not the Koran (#13) and Bhagavadgita (#23)?
You'd be suprised at the Christocentric bias that prevails -- to this very enlightened day -- in our library system. In the dewey decimal category for religion (the 200s), everything between 220-289 covers Christianity in some way. Into the small space of 290-299 is crammed "everything else" -- Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, New Age, Gnosticism (!), Scientology, witchcraft, whatever. (See here).
The dewey system has needed a reworking for some time -- just like OCLC's blessing of the Christian bible.
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