The street booksellers of New York who haunt the estate sales of deceased book lovers know where to get the best books. Via LibraryThing’s I See Dead People’s Books group:
James Joyce, genius:
- The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence
- The Book of the Land of Ire, Being a Record of Those Things That Were Done by the Men of Ire in the Days When the Men of Hun Made War Upon the Earth, by Alpheo That Is a Humble Disciple and Brother Scribe of One Artemas That Hath Recorded in Many Noble Volumes All Those Things That Were Done by the Men of Ire in Those Days
- More
Tupac Shakur, American MC:
- The Diary of Anais Nin, 1931-1934
- Kabbalah by Gershom Scholem
- The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
- The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
- More
Ernest Hemingway, adventurer:
- Anglo-Saxon Attitudes: A Novel by Angus Wilson
- Animal Navigation: How Animals Find Their Way About by J. D. Carthy
- The Backgrounds of Ulysses by Richard Ellmann
- The Changing Face of Beauty: Four Thousand Years of Beautiful Women by Madge Garland
- More
Benjamin Franklin, inventor:
- A General Description of All Trades
- True Contentment in the Gaine of Godliness, With Its Self-Sufficiencie, A Meditation by Thomas Gataker
- Astrologo-Mastix, or a Discovery of the Vanity and Iniquity of Judiciall Astrology, or Divining by the Starres the Successe or Miscarriage of Humane Affaires by John Geree
- More
F. Scott Fitzgerald, brilliant drinker:
- Apes, Men and Morons by Earnest Albert Hooton
- The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche by H.L. Mencken
- Poems of the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood by Padraic Colum
- The Journal of a Disappointed Man by W. N. P. Barbellion
- More
Your favorite living authors have made their shelves public on bookish social networks as well, FYI—peruse the libraries of David Weinberger, Jami Attenberg, Ron Silliman, Mike McGonigal (Chemical Imbalance, anyone?) and more.