1. The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren
2. The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama
3. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
4. The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
5. First Break All the Rules by Marcus Buckingham
6. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
7. Holy Bible (King James Version)
8. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
9. The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper
10. A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle

Paraphrasing wouldn’t do the list justice so here you go, with a hearty ‘Thank You’ to Gwyn,  Richard Gwyn’s top 10 books In Which Things End Badly verbatim:

1. The Bible by various authors
   I am thinking specifically of the New Testament here, the gospels, where the protagonist, an illegitimate carpenter from Nazareth, is crucified. By an extraordinary twist of events, this act of crucifixion provided western culture with its predilection for unhappy endings as well as a template for suffering, and a philosophy of childcare and education based on the twin bastions of fear and guilt. The template of the crucifixion presupposes that we all have a personal cross to bear in order to traverse this vale of tears that constitutes our earthly existence. We are told “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” I don’t get it at all. I realise that redemption and eternal life is the pay-off, but what kind of a father sacrifices his own child for an ideal when it is that same father who made up the rules in the first place? And what a horrid way to die, nailed to a cross while stinking legionnaires jibe and scoff. Having said that, it has to be added that the figure of Christ presents the archetype of the wounded healer: what makes you sick can also make you well.
2. Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe
   This one is straightforward enough. The presumed existence of his opposite number provides proof of God’s existence. God’s adversary, the Prince of Darkness, Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub (he has more names than the names of God, which are numberless) will, for a fee, grant whatever you wish: the catch is that you must hand over your soul for ever and ever. A simple barter, it provides us with the second archetype: the notion of the antichrist. Scary. Because a) you never think the end will actually come, so busy are you in revelry and debauch, and b) once your time has come there is no turning back. Actually the story of Faust was an integral force within the alchemical tradition; let’s call it an allegory. Marlowe’s version is of mixed literary value, while the later version, by Goethe, is held to be the ultimate expression of poetic drama in the German language. I remember, as a child, reading an encyclopaedia in which the IQ’s of ‘Great Men of History’ had been calculated (but we were not told how). Goethe topped the chart with an estimated IQ of 210.
3. Villette by Charlotte Bronte
   The heroine, Lucy Snowe, has found on her return to England from what is apparently Belgium, that the man she believed to be uninterested is in fact in love with her (as she with him), to the point that he sails to England to be with her. The ship is left in the reader’s command: does it arrive and romance ensue, or is it wrecked in a storm? It’s presumed Charlotte’s father, objecting to the original, uncharacteristically unhappy ending, made her alter the straightforward death to this ambiguous one. This new, revised version relied on the reader’s own interpretation of events: what happened to our heroine’s man? Was he shipwrecked, or was God kind to the quixotic pair? In all likelihood, God was not.
4. Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
   You would have thought it was bad enough to wake up and find oneself transformed into a huge bug, but for Gregor Samsa worse was to come. His first concern is that he has turned into woodlouse-man, but is rapidly overtaken by the fear that this might make him late for work. Because of his condition, he is forced to remain in his room, and his family has to take in lodgers to compensate for the loss of income. Thus abandoned, he dies a miserable death, alone and neglected.
5. The Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
   We know that Antoinette becomes Bertha in Jane Eyre. There could not be a greater difference than the one between her sun-filled life in Jamaica to the gloomy grey landscape of England, where she is locked away in her husband, Rochester’s home. But is she really mad or merely an inconvenience to her husband? Perhaps, too, typically of Victorian men, he is scared of women, or at least of their perceived psychic menace. The book carries an ominous sense of dread or foreboding, as though Antoinette/Bertha’s destiny is already set, and measured here in a beautiful, darkly poetic language. When I was a boy there was a TV adaptation of Jane Eyre, broadcast, I seem to remember, early on a Sunday evening, the most truly dire hour of day to be growing up in cold, damp Britain.
6. The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa
   In La Guerra Del Fin Del Mundo, allegedly based on the actual events of the Battle of Canudos at the turn of the 19th century in Brazil, and with themes reminiscent of the revolutionary millenarians and mystical anarchists of the European middle ages, Vargas Llosa shows us the lives, dreams and obsessions of an oddball gang of protagonists, loosely based on contemporary archives. Vargas Llosa, not generally my favourite Latin American author, steers a course skilfully through the political, religious and imaginative landscape of the newly-founded Brazilian Republic, marking out the tensions that existed then and continue to divide Brazil today. Never less than gripping, the description of the beleaguered rebels under siege by government forces is mesmerising as the novel moves inexorably towards a really unhappy ending.
7. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
   Things end badly simply by dint of the hero, Patrick Bateman, remaining alive at the end of this grueling odyssey to nowhere, although he does make a phantasmagorical appearance in the writer’s latest, and most interesting novel, Lunar Park, when the character ‘Bret Easton Ellis’ believes he is being stalked by his own fictional creation. Yes, we are asked to believe, as his list of murderees grows, this is what a corporate culture allows us. No room for God here since the power of the killer has made redemption unthinkable and a devil’s bargain expedient.
8. Heaven’s Edge by Romesh Gunesekera
   In this unjustly neglected, beautifully nuanced novel, the narrator, Marc, visits a quasi-mythical island said to be near the edge of heaven. As his fantastical adventures ensue, reality is fragmented and we move through a dreamscape populated by eco-warriors, a subterranean city, freedom fighters and their pursuers, towards an improbable and tragic finale. In luscious, textured prose, the book shows us how important it is to stay faithful to the imagination when confronted by repressive forces. At one stage Marc remembers his grandfather: “The future,” he was fond of saying, “is not something you can imagine. You can only rearrange the past in your mind, you know, to look like it is still to come. We have to bathe in a pool of memory, and play little tricks with its surface, just to live another day. We think we are going forwards, but really we are always on a journey going back to find something that we might once almost have had.”
9. Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo
   My daughter Sioned suggested this one. As Thomas Peaceful lies awake in the first world war trenches the night before his brother is due to be executed for desertion, he thinks back over their childhood together. This book is a touching and sensitive account of their family life in the Devon countryside before their world is transformed by the war; of their adventures with ‘simple’ brother Big Joe and friend Molly, and of their coming of age together. The gentle and lucid writing make it accessible to children, but it is also an entrancing story for older readers.
10. Sheepshagger by Niall Griffiths
    “Of mountains, mud and mire is this young Ianto made. Fern-fronds his hair, stream-spume his drool. Night-time anthracite the pupils of his eyes.” A slowly dawning revenge tragedy in which brutality and tenderness are seen to co-exist in the faltering mind of the beautifully drawn Ianto, a semi-feral boy who has lost his ancestral farmhouse to incomers in rural mid-Wales. A tale of patheism, animism and the God of Wild Things.

1. In case you haven’t read “The Lorax,” it’s widely recognized as Dr. Seuss’ take on environmentalism and how humans are destroying nature. Loggers were so upset about the book that some groups within the industry sponsored “The Truax,” a similar book — but from the logging point of view.

Another interesting fact: the book used to contain the line, “I hear things are just as bad up in Lake Erie,” but 14 years after the book was published, the Ohio Sea Grant Program wrote to Seuss creator Theodore Geisel, and told him how much the conditions had improved and implored him to take the line out. Geisel agreed and said that it wouldn’t be in future editions.

2. Somehow, Geisel’s books find themselves in the middle of controversy. The line “A person’s a person, no matter how small,” from “Horton Hears a Who!,” has been used as a slogan for anti-abortion organizations. It’s often questioned whether that was Seuss’ intent in the first place, but when he was still alive, he threatened to sue an anti-abortion group unless they removed his words from their letterhead.

3. “If I Ran the Zoo,” published in 1950, is the first recorded instance of the word “nerd.”

4. “The Cat in the Hat” was written because Dr. Seuss thought the famous Dick and Jane primers were insanely boring. Because kids weren’t interested in the material, they weren’t exactly compelled to use it repeatedly in their efforts to learn to read. So, “The Cat in the Hat” was born.

5. Bennett Cerf, Dr. Seuss’ editor, bet him that he couldn’t write a book using 50 words or less. “The Cat in the Hat” was pretty simple, after all, and it used 225 words. Not one to back down from a challenge, Mr. Geisel started writing and came up with “Green Eggs and Ham” — which uses exactly 50 words.

The 50 words, by the way, are: a, am, and, anywhere, are, be, boat, box, car, could, dark, do, eat, eggs, fox, goat, good, green, ham, here, house, I, if, in, let, like, may, me, mouse, not, on, or, rain, Sam, say, see, so, thank, that, the, them, there, they, train, tree, try, will, with, would, you.

6. It’s often alleged that “Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now!” was written specifically about Richard Nixon, but the book came out only two months after the whole Watergate scandal. It’s unlikely that the book could have been conceived of, written, edited and mass produced in such a short time.

Also, Seuss never admitted that the story was originally about Nixon. That’s not to say he didn’t understand how well the two flowed together. In 1974, he sent a copy of Marvin K. Mooney to his friend Art Buchwald at the Washington Post. In it, he crossed out “Marvin K. Mooney” and replaced it with “Richard M. Nixon,” which Buchwald reprinted in its entirety.

7. “Yertle the Turtle” = Hitler? Yep. If you haven’t read the story, here’s a little overview: Yertle is the king of the pond, but he wants more. He demands that other turtles stack themselves up so he can sit on top of them to survey the land. Mack, the turtle at the bottom, is exhausted. He asks Yertle for a rest; Yertle ignores him and demands more turtles for a better view.

Eventually, Yertle notices the moon and is furious that anything dare be higher than himself, and is about ready to call for more turtles when Mack burps. This sudden movement topples the whole stack, sends Yertle flying into the mud, and frees the rest of the turtles from their stacking duty.

Dr. Seuss actually said Yertle was a representation of Hitler. Despite the political nature of the book, none of that was disputed at Random House — what was disputed was Mack’s burp. No one had ever let a burp loose in a children’s book before, so it was a little dicey. In the end, obviously, Mack burped.

8. “The Butter Battle Book” is one I had never heard of, perhaps with good reason: it was pulled from the shelves of libraries for a while because of the reference to the Cold War and the arms race.

Yooks and Zooks are societies who do everything differently. The Yooks eat their bread with the butter-side up and the Zooks eat their bread with the butter-side down. Obviously, one of them must be wrong, so they start building weapons to outdo each other: the “Tough-Tufted Prickly Snick-Berry Switch,” the “Triple-Sling Jigger,” the “Jigger-Rock Snatchem,” the “Kick-A-Poo Kid”, the “Eight-Nozzled Elephant-Toted Boom Blitz,” the “Utterly Sputter” and the “Bitsy Big-Boy Boomeroo.”

The book concludes with each side ready to drop their ultimate bombs on each other, but the reader doesn’t know how it actually turns out.

9. “Oh The Places You’ll Go” is the final Seuss book published before he passed away. Published in 1990, it sells about 300,000 copies every year because so many people give it to college and high school grads.

10. No Dr. Seuss post would be complete without a mention of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas!” Frankenstein’s Monster himself, Boris Karloff, provided the voice of the Grinch and the narration for the movie. Seuss was a little wary of casting him because he thought his voice would be too scary for kids. If you’re wondering why they sound a bit different, it’s because the sound people went back to the Grinch’s parts and removed all of the high tones in Karloff’s voice. That’s why the Grinch sounds so gravelly.

Tony the Tiger, AKA Thurl Ravenscroft, is the voice behind “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.” He received no credit on screen, so Dr. Seuss wrote to columnists in every major U.S. newspaper to tell them exactly who had sung the song

1. Othello by William Shakespeare
2. Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky
3. The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren
4. The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama
5. Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama
6. Time to Think by Nancy Kline
7. A Mercy by Toni Morrison
8. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski
9. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
10. Cultivation of Christmas Trees by T.S. Eliot

I always find it fascinating when we sell large collections of ephemera such as magazines, there were a few magazines I collected as a child out of pure interest in the subject matter but the concept that a it could become valuable never entered my brain. I suppose that is how most of these collections started as well. The other thing I sometimes forget about is when sets of books or magazines are sold online they can be quite large. I can imagine the anticipation the buyer is having waiting for their new prize to be delivered, I get excited when a single book arives at my door, imagine 125 kilos of Islamic art….

1. Gedenkweerdige Brasiliaense Zee-en Lant-Reise by Johan Nieuhoff - $6,849
Voyages and Travels into Brazil, and the East Indies by this 17th century Dutch explorer.
2. Security Analysis by Benjamin Graham – $6,000
First edition and first printing of Graham’s legendary book on speculative investing – published in 1934
3. Le Capital by Karl Marx – $5,795
First French edition of Das Kapital, published in 1872 and revised by Marx himself. The English edition, edited by Engels, was based on the French.
4. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand - $5,750
True first edition, first printing from 1957 – signed by Ayn Rand
5. Cezanne by Duret, Mirbeau et al – $5,600
First edition 1914, limited to 600 copies, one of 400 printed on Papier a Grain.
6. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson - $4,870
First London edition, published 1883. Includes publisher’s adverts dated October 1883.
7. Hali Magazine (147 issues) – $4,805
A complete run, issues 1 to 147 from 1978 to 1995, of Hali – a London-based magazine devoted to oriental rugs and carpets.
8. On the Anatomy of the Breast by Astley Paston Cooper - $4,729
First edition, published in 1840. Two volumes with 27 lithographed plates. The last book written by the famous English surgeon. *Note first editions available at time of writing
9. The Quran Al-Qur’an of Sultan Mulay Zaidan $4,364
A 1996 Spanish facsimile edition of the 1599 publication from Marrakech, Morocco. Limited pressing of 980 copies.
10. The True Prophecies or Prognostications of Michael Nostradamus by Nostradamus - $4,300
The first English translation of the works of Nostradamus, printed in 1672. Rebound in leather. *Note link leads to archival reprint