Six Degrees of the Modern Library
From the mid 1950s to the mid 1960s, the Modern Library editors placed recommended reading lists of Modern Library titles currently in print on the dust jackets. The recommendations were based on what the editors thought readers of that title would also enjoy. Almost all Regular dust jacket types i, j, and k and Giant dust jacket types Ge, Gf, and Gg contained the lists. A few titles, such as the Modern Library Dictionary, did not have a list. On type i and Ge dust jackets the lists were on the rear inside flap. On type j, k, Gf, and Gg the lists were on the dust jacket back panel. The earlier jackets (i and Ge) had either 4 or 5 titles listed. Given more space on the rear jacket panel, the later jackets (j, k, Gf and Gg) had as many as 25 (or more) titles listed.
The Six Degrees of the Modern Library provides those recommended lists, and will track them up to six degrees away from a given title. For example, Tale of Two Cities is in the recommended list for Our Mutual Friend, and is thus one degree away. Eminent Victorians is not in the recommended list for Our Mutual Friend, but it IS in the list for Tale of Two Cities. Thus, Eminent Victorians is two degrees away from Our Mutual Friend.
Six Degrees will also work in a second dimension by including titles in the search that are not in the recommend list of a given title, but titles that recommend that title. Using African Queen as an example, BUtterfield 8 is not in its recommended list. However BUtterfield 8 does include African Queen in its recommended list. So by choosing a search to include the second dimension, BUtterfield 8 shows up in the first degree recommended list for African Queen and expands outward in this other dimension as well. This will, of course, produce more results in most cases (and sometimes quite a significant difference).
Given the limited number of jacket types these recommended lists appeared on, titles available here are restricted to those in print between 1954 and 1966. Still, that is quite a few ML titles: over 460.
Read a new book, as recommended by the Marketing boys at ML, based on a favorite title you have already read. Or, just see where the trail leads from one ML title to another. Have fun. See what is within six degrees of your favorite title.
[A] [B] [C] [D] [E] [F] [G] [H] [I] [J] [K] [L] [M] [N] [O] [P] [Q] [R] [S] [T] [U] [V] [W] [XYZ]
101 Years Entertainment (Misc)
49 Stories (O'Hara)
A
Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner)
Act One (Hart M.)
Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan (Morier)
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Doyle)
African Queen (Forester)
Age of Innocence (Wharton)
Age of Reason (Sartre)
Ah, Wilderness and Two Other Plays (O'Neill)
Alice in Wonderland etc (Carroll)
All the King's Men (Warren)
American Tragedy (Dreiser)
Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
Anthology of Famous American Stories (Misc)
Anthology of Famous British Stories (Misc)
Anthology of Famous English and American Poetry (Misc)
Anthology of Irish Literature (Misc)
Anthology of Medieval Lyrics (Misc)
Antic Hay (Huxley)
Aphrodite (Louys)
Apocrypha (Misc)
Apologia Pro Vita Sua (Newman)
Appointment In Samarra (O'Hara)
Arabian Nights (Burton)
Autobiography (Cellini)
Autobiography (Franklin)
B
Barchester Towers & The Warden (Trollope)
Basic Works (Cicero)
Basic Writings (Freud)
Basic Writings (Jung)
Best American Humorous Short Stories (Misc)
Best Known Novels (Eliot)
Best of Perelman (Perelman)
Best Plays (Chekhov)
Best Russian Short Stories (Misc)
Best Short Stories (Dostoevsky)
Best Short Stories (Harte)
Best Short Stories (Henry)
Best Short Stories (Maugham)
Best Stories (Maupassant)
Bostonians (James H.)
Brave New World (Huxley)
Brothers Karamazov (Dostoyevsky)
Bulfinch's Mythology (Bulfinch)
Butterfield 8 (O'Hara)
C
Cakes and Ale (Maugham)
Camille (Dumas)
Candide and Other Writings (Voltaire)
Canterbury Tales (Chaucer)
Capital (Marx)
Capital and Other writings (Marx)
Captive (Proust)
Cass Timberlane (Lewis)
Catcher in the Rye (Salinger)
Cities of the Plain (Proust)
City of God (Augustine)
Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (Burckhardt)
Clarissa (Richardson S.)
Cloister and the Hearth (Reade)
Collected Poetry (Parker)
Collected Short Stories (Lardner)
Collected Stories (Parker)
Comedies Vol I (Shakespeare)
Comedies Vol II (Shakespeare)
Coming of Age in Samoa (Mead)
Coming Struggle For Power (Strachey)
Compleat Angler (Walton)
Complete Essays and Other Writings (Emerson)
Complete Greek Tragedies Vol I (Aeschylus)
Complete Greek Tragedies Vol II (Aeschylus)
Complete Greek Tragedies Vol III (Sophocles)
Complete Greek Tragedies Vol IV (Sophocles)
Complete Greek Tragedies Vol V (Euripides)
Complete Greek Tragedies Vol VI (Euripides)
Complete Greek Tragedies Vol VII (Euripides)
Complete Novels (Austen)
Complete Novels/Selected Tales (Hawthorne)
Complete Plays of Gilbert & Sullivan (Gilbert etc.)
Complete Poems (Thompson)
Complete Poems of Keats & Shelley (Keats etc.)
Complete Poetry (Hoffenstein)
Complete Poetry & Selected Prose (Keats)
Complete Poetry and Selected Prose (Donne)
Complete Poetry and Selected Prose (Donne & Blake)
Complete Poetry and Selected Prose (Milton)
Complete Tales and Poems (Poe)
Complete Works (Homer)
Complete Works (Horace)
Complete Works (Rabelais)
Complete Works (Tacitus)
Complete Works and Letters (Lamb)
Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (Carroll)
Complete Writings (Thucydides)
Comprehensive Anthology of American Poetry (Misc)
Confessions (Augustine)
Confessions (Rousseau)
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (Twain)
Conquest of Mexico and Conquest of Peru (Prescott)
Consolation of Philosophy (Boethius, etc.)
Counterfeiters & the Journal (Gide)
Cousin Bette (Balzac)
Creative Evolution (Bergson)
Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky)
Critique of Pure Reason (Kant)
Cyrano de Bergerac (Rostand)
D
Dance of Life (Ellis)
Darkness at Noon (Koestler)
David Copperfield (Dickens)
Dead Souls (Gogol)
Death Be Not Proud (Gunther)
Decameron (Boccaccio)
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Volume 1) (Gibbon)
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Volume 2) (Gibbon)
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Volume 3) (Gibbon)
Decline of the West (Spengler)
Deepening Stream (Canfield)
Diana of the Crossways (Meredith)
Diary of a Young Girl (Frank)
Dictionary: A Modern Selection (Johnson)
Disraeli (Maurois)
Divine Comedy (Dante)
Doctor Zhivago (Pasternak)
Dodsworth (Lewis)
Doll's House/Ghosts/Enemy of the People/Master Builder (Ibsen)
Don Juan (Byron)
Don Quixote (Cervantes)
Dracula (Stoker)
Droll Stories (Balzac)
Dubliners (Joyce)
E
Education of Henry Adams (Adams)
Egoist (Meredith)
Eight Famous Elizabethan Plays (Misc)
Eight Plays (Moliere)
Eight Spanish Plays of the Golden Age (Misc)
Eighteenth Century Plays (Misc)
Eleven Plays (Ibsen)
Eminent Victorians (Strachey)
Emperor Jones/Anna Christie/Hairy Ape (O'Neill)
Encyclopedia of Modern American Humor (Misc)
English Philosophers from Bacon to Mill (Misc)
Enormous Room (Cummings)
Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited (Butler)
European Philosophers from Descartes to Nietzsche (Misc)
Eustace Diamonds (Trollope)
F
Fable (Faulkner)
Fall/Exile and the Kingdom (Camus)
Famous Ghost Stories (Misc)
Famous Science Fiction Stories (Misc)
Fathers and Sons (Turgenev)
Faulkner Reader (Faulkner)
Faust (Goethe)
Federalist (Misc)
Five Great Modern Irish Plays (Misc)
Flowering Judas (Porter)
Fortitude (Walpole)
Four Plays (Hellman)
Four Plays (Shaw G.B.)
Fourteen Great Detective Stories (Misc)
French Revolution (Carlyle)
G
Gallic War and Other Writings (Caesar)
Garden Party (Mansfield)
Go Down Moses (Faulkner)
God's Little Acre (Caldwell)
Golden Treasury (Palgrave)
Good Earth (Buck)
Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck)
Great Ages and Ideas of the Jewish People (Misc)
Great Classical Myths (Misc)
Great German Short Novels and Stories (Misc)
Great Modern Short Stories (Misc)
Great Spanish Stories (Misc)
Great Tales of the American West (Misc)
Great Voices of the Reformation (Misc)
Greek Commonwealth (Zimmern)
Greek Poets (Misc)
Greek Way (Hamilton)
Green Mansions (Hudson)
Guermantes Way (Proust)
Guide to Great Orchestral Music (Spaeth)
Gulliver's Travels & Other Writings (Swift)
H
Hellenistic Philosophy (Misc)
Henry Esmond (Thackeray)
High Wind in Jamaica (Hughes)
Hiroshima (Hersey)
Histories and Poems Vol II (Shakespeare)
Histories Vol I (Shakespeare)
History of Greece (Bury)
History of the Borgias (Corvo)
History of the Great American Fortunes (Myers)
Human Nature and Conduct (Dewey)
Humphry Clinker (Smollett)
Hunchback of Notre Dame (Hugo)
I
I Can Get It For You Wholesale (Weidman)
I, Claudius (Graves)
Idiot (Dostoyevsky)
Iliad (Homer)
In Dubious Battle (Steinbeck)
Intelligence in the Modern World (Dewey)
Interpretation of Dreams (Freud)
Introduction to Aristotle (Aristotle)
Introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas (Aquinas)
Intruder in the Dust (Faulkner)
Invisible Man (Ellison)
Irish Fairy & Folk Tales (Misc)
J
Jane Eyre (Bronte C.)
John Dewey On Education (Dewey)
Joseph Andrews (Fielding)
Journals (Emerson)
Jude the Obscure (Hardy)
K
Kierkegaard Anthology (Kierkegaard)
Kim (Kipling)
L
Lady Chatterley's Lover (Lawrence)
Last of the Wine (Renault)
Late George Apley (Marquand)
Latin Poets (Misc)
Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose (Whitman)
Les Miserables (Hugo)
Lie Down in Darkness (Styron)
Life & Works of Beethoven (Burk)
Life and Selected Writings (Jefferson)
Life and Writings (Lincoln)
Life of Jesus (Renan)
Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti (Symonds)
Life of Samuel Johnson (Boswell)
Light in August (Faulkner)
Little Women (Alcott)
Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects (Vasari)
Lives of the Twelve Caesars (Suetonius)
Livy: A History of Rome (Livy)
Long Voyage Home (O'Neill)
Look Homeward, Angel (Wolfe)
Looking Backward (Bellamy)
Lord Jim (Conrad)
Lust for Life (Stone)
M
Madame Bovary (Flaubert)
Making of Man (Misc)
Making of Society (Misc)
Man's Fate (Malraux)
Marius the Epicurean (Pater)
Mayor of Casterbridge (Hardy)
Medici (Young)
Medieval Epics (Misc)
Medieval Philosophy (Misc)
Medieval Romances (Misc)
Memoirs (Casanova)
Messer Marco Polo (Byrne)
Metropolitan Opera Guide (Misc)
Mind/Faith of Justice Holmes (Holmes)
Mlle de Maupin/Cleopatra's Nights (Gautier)
Moby Dick (Melville)
Moll Flanders (Defoe)
Moon and Sixpence (Maugham)
Moonstone/Woman in White (Collins)
N
Naked and the Dead (Mailer)
Nana (Zola)
Napoleon (Ludwig)
Native Son (Wright R.)
New Anthology of Modern Poetry (Misc)
New Voices in the American Theatre (Misc)
Nine Plays (O'Neill)
Nine Stories (Salinger)
Nostromo (Conrad)
Notebooks (Da Vinci)
Notebooks, 1935-1942 (Camus)
O
Odyssey (Homer)
Of Human Bondage (Maugham)
Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck)
Old Wives' Tale (Bennett)
On Population (Malthus)
Oracles of Nostradamus (Ward)
Ordeal of Richard Feverel (Meredith)
Oregon Trail (Parkman)
Origin of the Species/Descent of Man (Darwin)
Our Mutual Friend (Dickens)
Out of Africa (Dinesen)
Outline of Abnormal Psychology (Misc)
Outline of Psychoanalysis (Misc)
P
Pale Horse, Pale Rider (Porter)
Parnassus On Wheels (Morley)
Past Recaptured (Proust)
Pathfinder (Cooper)
Penguin Island (France)
Pensees and the Provincial Letters (Pascal)
Pere Goriot and Eugenie Grandet (Balzac)
Persian Wars (Herodotus)
Personal History of Henry VIII (Hackett)
Philosophical Writings (Descartes)
Philosophies of Art and Beauty (Misc)
Philosophy (Hegel)
Philosophy (Hume)
Philosophy (James W.)
Philosophy (Kant)
Philosophy (Nietzsche)
Philosophy of John Stuart Mill (Mill)
Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Schopenhauer)
Philosophy of Spinoza (Spinoza)
Philosophy [Works] of Plato (Plato)
Pickwick Papers (Dickens)
Picture of Dorian Gray/De Profundis (Wilde)
Plague (Camus)
Plays (Moliere)
Plays (Wilde)
Plutarch's Lives (Plutarch)
Poems (Frost)
Poems (Longfellow)
Poems & Plays (Browning)
Poems and Fairy Tales (Wilde)
Poems, Prose and Plays (Pushkin)
Point Counter Point (Huxley)
Politics (Aristotle)
Poorhouse Fair/Rabbit, Run (Updike)
Portrait of a Lady (James H.)
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce)
Possessed (Dostoyevsky)
Praise of Folly (Erasmus)
Precious Bane (Webb)
Pride and Prejudice/Sense and Sensibility (Austen)
Prince and The Discourses (Machiavelli)
Progress and Poverty (George H.)
R
Rainbow (Lawrence)
Rebecca (Du Maurier D)
Red and the Black (Stendhal)
Red Badge of Courage (Crane)
Renaissance (Pater)
Renaissance in Italy Vol I (Symonds)
Renaissance in Italy Vol II (Symonds)
Republic (Plato)
Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (Camus)
Restoration Plays (Misc)
Return of the Native (Hardy)
Rhetoric and Poetics (Aristotle)
Rise of Silas Lapham (Howells)
Roan Stallion (Jeffers)
Robinson Crusoe/Plague Year (Defoe)
Roman Comedies (Misc)
Romance of Leonardo Da Vinci (Merejkowski)
S
Saint Joan/Major Barbara/Androcles (Shaw G.B.)
Samuel Pepys' Diary (Pepys)
Sanctuary (Faulkner)
Satyricon (Petronius)
Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne)
Selected Essays (Montaigne)
Selected Essays (Tolstoy)
Selected Papers (Russells)
Selected Poems (Dickinson)
Selected Poetry (Auden)
Selected Poetry (Browning)
Selected Poetry (Byron)
Selected Poetry (Spenser)
Selected Poetry (Tennyson)
Selected Poetry (Wordsworth)
Selected Poetry and Prose (Blake)
Selected Poetry and Prose (Coleridge)
Selected Poetry and Prose (Poe)
Selected Poetry and Prose (Shelley)
Selected Short Stories (Faulkner)
Selected Short Stories (O'Hara)
Selected Short Stories (Shaw I.)
Selected Stories (Aleichem)
Selected Stories (Kafka)
Selected Stories (Welty)
Selected Stories (Wodehouse)
Selected Verse (Nash)
Selected Works (Pope)
Selected Works/Citizen Paine (Fast/Paine)
Selected Writings (Bacon)
Selected Writings (Burke)
Selected Writings (Capote)
Selected Writings (Emerson)
Selected Writings (Irving)
Selected Writings (Melville)
Selected Writings (Michener)
Selected Writings (Stein)
Selected Writings (Stevenson)
Sense of Beauty (Santayana)
Seven Famous Greek Plays (Misc)
Seven Gothic Tales (Dinesen)
She/King Solomon's Mines (Haggard)
Shock of Recognition (Misc)
Short Bible (Misc)
Short History of United States (Nevins etc.)
Short Novels (Tolstoy)
Short Stories (James H.)
Short Stories (Saki)
Short Stories (Tolstoy)
Sister Carrie (Dreiser)
Six American Plays for Today (Misc)
Six Modern American Plays (Misc)
Six Novels (Colette)
Six Plays (Hellman)
Six Plays (Ibsen)
Six Plays (Kaufman etc.)
Six Plays (Odets)
Six Plays by Corneille & Racine (Corneille etc.)
Six Plays by Rodgers & Hammerstein (Rodgers etc.)
Sixteen Famous American Plays (Misc)
Sixteen Famous British Plays (Misc)
Sixteen Famous European Plays (Misc)
Sons and Lovers (Lawrence)
Sound and the Fury (Faulkner)
Sound and the Fury & As I lay Dying (Faulkner)
South Wind (Douglas)
Steppenwolf (Hesse)
Stoic & Epicurean Philosophers (Misc)
Stories (Chekhov [Tchekov])
Stories of Modern Italy (Misc)
Stories of Three Decades (Mann)
Storm (Stewart)
Studs Lonigan (Farrell)
Subtreasury of American Humor (Misc)
Swann's Way (Proust)
Sweet Cheat Gone (Proust)
T
Tale of Genji (Murasaki)
Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
Tales of Grimm and Andersen (Grimm etc.)
Ten Days That Shook the World (Reed)
Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Hardy)
Theory of the Leisure Class (Veblen)
Thirty Famous One-Act Plays (Misc)
Three Famous French Romances (Misc)
Three Musketeers (Dumas)
Three Soldiers (Dos Passos)
Thurber Carnival (Thurber)
Thus Spake Zarathustra (Nietzsche)
Tobacco Road (Caldwell)
Tom Jones (Fielding)
Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn (Twain)
Tono-Bungay (Wells)
Tortilla Flat (Steinbeck)
Tragedies Vol I (Shakespeare)
Tragedies Vol II (Shakespeare)
Travels of Marco Polo (Polo)
Treasury of Damon Runyon (Runyon)
Trial (Kafka)
Tristram Shandy (Sterne)
Turn of the Screw (James H.)
Twelve Famous Plays of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century (Misc)
Twentieth Century American Poetry (Misc)
Twenty German Poets (Misc)
Two Novels (Malamud)
Two Years Before the Mast (Dana)
U
U.S.A. (Dos Passos)
Ulysses (Joyce)
Uncle Tom's Cabin (Stowe)
V
Vanity Fair (Thackeray)
Varieties of Religious Experience (James W.)
Verses From 1929 On (Nash)
Vicar of Wakefield (Goldsmith)
Victory (Conrad)
Virgil's Works (Virgil)
W
Walden and Other Writings (Thoreau)
Wandering Jew (Sue)
War and Peace (Tolstoy)
Washington Square (James H.)
Way of All Flesh (Butler)
Wealth of Nations (Smith)
What Cheer (Misc)
What Makes Sammy Run? (Schulberg)
Wild Duck & Other Plays (Ibsen)
Winesburg, Ohio (Anderson)
Wings of The Dove (James H.)
Wisdom of Catholicism (Misc)
Wisdom of China and India (Misc)
Wisdom of Confucius (Confucius)
Wisdom of Israel (Misc)
Wisdom of Laotse (Laotse)
Within a Budding Grove (Proust)
Women in Love (Lawrence)
World's Great Operas (Howard)
Wuthering Heights (Bronte E.)
XYZ
Young Lions (Shaw I.)
Zuleika Dobson (Beerbohm)
Total number of titles = 473
Total number of recommendations = 2,762