The Manual For Civilization Begins

As we near completion on the construction at the new Long Now space in Fort Mason, we are also building the collection of books that will reside here.  We have named this collection The Manual for Civilization, and it will include the roughly 3000 books you would most want to rebuild civilization. While this may sound a little apocalyptic, we are not predicting any collapse of civilization. As it turns out, using this as an editing principle just seems to give us a very interesting collection of books.

So… If you were stranded on an island (or small hostile planetoid), what books would YOU want to have with you?  We began asking this question to the Long Now Board and staff, and have now reached out to our Salon supporters and the Long Now members.

We have also begun reaching out to experts and others with great collections and networks.

Author Neal Stephenson selecting books for the Manual For Civilization

This process has just begun, and we will detail these submissions and trips to amazing libraries more in the future, but some of the guest contributors include:

Brian Eno – A list of books on Long-term thinking
Neal Stephenson – A selection of useful history books
Violet Blue – Books on human sexuality
Kevin Kelly – A huge list of appropriate technology and other books from his library
Hugh Howey – Donated a special edition set of his Silo Saga
Ami Burnham – A collection of the best books on reproduction and birth
Alex Steffen – Books on Futurism
Jill Tartar – First Contact
Bruce Sterling – Science Fiction
David Brin – Science Fiction




Kevin Kelly selecting books for the Manual For Civilization

What are these books?  In order to make sure we don’t just get a bunch of books on how to make fire, we spread the collection across four basic categories to help guide the collection process:

Cultural Canon (Great Books, Shakespeare, Plato, etc.)
Mechanics of Civilization (Technical knowledge, how to build and understand things)
Rigorous Science Fiction (Science fiction that tells a useful story about a potential future)
Long-term Thinking, Futurism, and relevant history (Books on how to think about the future that may include surveys of the past)

We will be publishing the list in the coming months once we have the suggestions narrowed down by our members and supporters.  We have reached about 1400 nominations but will need four to five thousand to have enough to winnow it down to the very best 3000 books.  We are not limiting the nominations to western civilization, or even the English language, as one piece of the collection will be the Rosetta Disk itself.

But now that we have a good start on the collection, we need to begin editing the list down.  We are using an open source voting system suggested by Heath Rezabek called “All Our Ideas” which has turned out to be a great way to sort lists like this.  The system allows our supporters to choose between just two books in a given category, or suggest a new book.  This way you don’t have to rank a huge list of books, rather just make decisions between book A or book B and these decisions are aggregated.  We are just now sending this system out to our staff and supporters and it is yielding great results.  You can see an example of what a voting page looks like below.

Once the Salon is open we hope to have events where people can argue a new book in OR out of the collection.  It will be a living collection.  The Internet Archive has generously agreed to serve as the digital backup repository of the collection so that anyone with internet access can “check out” the books, or use the list to help create their version of the archive.

So how can you contribute and share your opinion?  The first contributors are our members and Salon supporters.  If you have a particular expertise or suggested resource, we welcome you to make book recommendations in the comments of this post.  Soon we will also need to begin collecting the actual books for our shelves. We had a fair number of titles in the Long Now library to begin with, but we only have about 15% of the books suggested to date.  So once we have the list edited down, we will be asking for book donations to fill in the collection.  We are also hoping to work with local book sellers and dealers so that we can get as many used books as possible.  Please do leave a comment on this post if you are interested in helping to supply books.

This project was originally conceived in a meeting hosted at the Internet Archive by Brewster Kahle with Kevin Kelly, Rick and Megan Prelinger and Alexander Rose.  Past references and writing on this can be found in this Manual for Civilization blog article by Alexander Rose as well in the Library of Utility article by Kevin Kelly.  Data wrangling is being ably handled by Kurt Bollacker and Catherine Borgeson with web help by Ben Keating, and the process has also been helped along by Intern Heath Rezabek.

In addition had several volunteers helping with the project that include:

Alison Hunter

Ashley Hennefer

Bryan Campen

Casey Cripe

Danielle Engelman

David Kelley

Elizabeth DeRieux

Nick Gottuso

James Alexander

Jennifer Woodfield

John Kausch

Kurt Bollacker

Ned McFarland

Michael McElligott

Michael Pujals

Alastair Mcpherson

Tim Reynolds

Whitney Deatherage

Mike Johnson