Brian Eno’s Selected Books for the Manual for Civilization

Brian Eno visited San Francisco to see the site where the Manual for Civilization shelves will be

Photo by Alexander Rose

 

Twenty books suggested by Long Now’s Founding Board Member Brian Eno form the first in a series of reports on additions to our Manual for Civilization collection. This library will eventually include 3,500 books you would most want to sustain or rebuild civilization. The Manual needs your help to get built!  Please make a donation so we can purchase these books and the shelves they go on.  The Manual will be a central feature of our new space that opens later this year. Here are Brian Eno’s recommendations:

Seeing Like a State by James C Scott
The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art by David Lewis-Williams
Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti
The Wheels of Commerce by Fernand Braudel
Keeping Together in Time by William McNeill
Dancing in the Streets by Barbara Ehrenreich
Roll Jordan Roll by Eugene Genovese
A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander et al
The Face of Battle by John Keegan
A History of the World in 100 Objects by  Neil MacGregor
Contingency, Irony and Solidarity by Richard Rorty
The Notebooks by Leonardo da Vinci
The Confidence Trap by David Runciman
The Discoverers by Daniel Boorstein
Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection by Sarah Hrdy
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
The Cambridge World History of Food (2-Volume Set) by Kenneth F. Kiple & Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas
The Illustrated Flora of Britain and Northern Europe by Marjorie Blamey & Christopher Grey Wilson
Printing and the Mind of Man by John Carter & Percy Muir
Peter the Great: His Life and World by Richard Massie

We need your help to finish this library. There are only weeks left to finish our fund raising and we need to raise at least another $100,000. Please make a donation to support this project and get direct access to the book recommendation and voting engine for the Manual for Civilization.

Some of the other contributor lists we will be sharing soon include selections from Stewart Brand, Neal Stephenson, Violet Blue, Kevin Kelly, Danny Hillis, Megan and Rick Prelinger and many more.

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 that evolves over time.  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.

You can see more about this project on the original Manual for Civilization blog post.  Soon we will need to begin collecting the actual books for our shelves, and will be asking for book donations from our edited list.  We hope that we can get many of these books from our community so that we don’t have to purchase too many new books.