Modern Library Totally Explained

Everything about The Modern Library totally explained

The Modern Library, a current division of Random House publishers, was founded in 1917 by Albert Boni and Horace Liveright. It was bought in 1925 by Bennett Cerf. Random House began in 1927 as a subsidiary of the Modern Library, but eventually became the parent company.

Recent history

The Modern Library originally published only hardbound books (beginning in 1917). In 1950 it began publishing the Modern Library College Editions, a forerunner of their current series of paperback classics. From 1955 to 1960 they published a quality numbered paperback series but discontinued it in 1960, when the series was folded into the newly acquired Vintage paperbacks group. Their homepage says: ť In 1992, on the occasion of the Modern Library's seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House embarked on an ambitious project to refurbish the series. We revived the torchbearer emblem that Cerf and Klopfer commissioned in 1925 from Lucian Bernhard. The Promethean bearer of enlightenment (known informally around the old Modern Library offices as the "dame running away from Bennett Cerf") was redesigned several times over the years, most notably by Rockwell Kent.

ť Today's Modern Library proudly displays the Bernhard colophon and endpapers, but everything else is new - we've designed new jackets and created new bindings; worn out type has been reset; out-of-date introductions have been replaced, translations scrutinized, titles added, and a line of Modern Library paperbacks has been launched, including Science, Food, Exploration, The Movies, Humor and Wit, and War. A Board of prominent thinkers advises us on selections, and our readers are participating as never before in the workings of the Modern Library via this website's Reading Guide Center and Suggest a Title link and 100 Best polls for the best novels and nonfiction of the 20th century. (External Link

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In 1998, novelist David Ebershoff became the Modern Library's new Publishing Director. Ebershoff ran the imprint until 2005, stepping down to concentrate on his own writing and to become editor-at-large at Random House.
In September 2000 the Modern Library launched a newly designed Paperback Classics series. Six new titles are published in the series on the second Tuesday of each month.

Modern Library lists

The Modern Library identified itself at its onset as "The Modern Library of the World's Best Books". In trying to keep with that identity, in 1998 they made a list of 100 novels called "Modern Library List of Best 20th-Century Novels"; an unscientific web poll to gather public opinion on the same was also conducted. The list was actually restricted to works in English, but the title of the list wasn't modified to reflect this, and little attention was paid to the fact in publicity for the list. The top ten books from both lists in each category are shown below. According to an article about the list in the New York Times, ť Executives at Random House said they hoped that as the century drew to a close their list would encourage public debate about the greatest works of fiction of the last hundred years, thus both increasing awareness of the Modern Library and stimulating sales of novels the group publishes. (External Link

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The lists have drawn heavy criticism. Their ranking system concerned many professional scholars and critics. The board members themselves, who didn't create the rankings and were unaware of it until the list was published, expressed disappointment and puzzlement (External Link

). There are only eight or nine women on the list, some highly influential works are ranked below works of questionable literary merit, and the works of major writers from many English-speaking countries apart from the USA and England - such as Australia, India, Canada, Sri Lanka and South Africa - have been ignored. There were also hypotheses that the Modern Library merely made a selection based on its stocklist. A. S. Byatt, the well known English novelist who was on the board, called the list "typically American."
The list was compiled via approval voting, by sending each board member a list of 440 pre-selected books from the Modern Library catalogue and asking each member to place a check beside novels they wished to choose. Then the works with the most votes were ranked the highest, and ties were broken arbitrarily by Random House publishers. This explains surprising results like the #5 placement of Brave New World, which most of the judges agreed belonged somewhere on the list, but much lower than the very top.

Board selections

Best 20th century novels

Ulysses by James Joyce
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Best 20th century non-fiction

The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams

The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James

Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington

A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson

Selected Essays, 1917-1932 by T. S. Eliot

The Double Helix by James D. Watson

Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov

The American Language by H. L. Mencken

General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes

Reader selections

Best 20th century novels

Best 20th century non-fiction

Objectivism: the Philosophy of Ayn Rand by Leonard Peikoff

101 Things to do 'Til the Revolution by Claire Wolfe

The God of the Machine by Isabel Paterson

by Michael Paxton

The Ultimate Resource by Julian Lincoln Simon

Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt

Send in the Waco Killers by Vin Suprynowicz

More Guns, Less Crime by John R. Lott David Ebershoff, the Modern Library division's publishing director, stated in a follow-up "the people who were drawn to go to the Modern Library Web site and compelled to vote have a certain enthusiasm about books and their favourite books that many people don't, so that the voting population is skewed." (External Link

) In other words, he believed that it was an insecure web poll, probably because of the success of Rand and Hubbard, especially Mission Earth, which is considered by many to be one of the worst science fiction novels ever published. (In addition, people were allowed to vote repeatedly, once per day, making the poll a measure of how much effort people would put into promoting their favorite books.) Others have been more direct in their descriptions of the results; librarian Robert Teeter remarks that the ballot boxes were "stuffed by cultists." (External Link

), as Scientology is a non-mainstream religion, and some have described Ayn Rand's following as cult-like. (The Reader's List in a way criticizes itself, with the inclusion of Darrell Huff's How to Lie with Statistics in the best non-fiction category.)

Further Information

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