More on "Best of" lists.

On the Times Literary Supplement blog, Michael Caines discusses the

Amelia B. Edwards, from
Harper's Magazine. NYPL

100 Best Novels list from 1898 that was created by editor-critic Clement K. Shorter, placing it alongside David Bowie's more recent list (Bowie's selections include Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and Edward Bulwer Lytton's Zanoni). The privileging of dead authors over living ones on such lists also is discussed.
There are quite a few books on Shorter's list that may provoke head scratching among today's readers, but Shorter does include the following:

• Gothic milestones The Castle of Otranto and The Mysteries of Udolpho (by Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe respectively)

• Catherine Crowe's Susan Hopley (maidservant solves crime; see also Dante Gabriel Rossetti's drawings of characters from this work)

• Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White

• Sheridan Le Fanu's Uncle Silas

• Amelia B. Edwards's Barbara's History (Edwards was a successful novelist before she became a cofounder of the Egypt Exploration Fund and an inspiration for Elizabeth Peters's Amelia Peabody Emerson)

Want to see a classic republished?

The Neglected Books blog calls our attention to the Hesperus Press competition, in which you can nominate an out-of-print book for republishing. The clock is ticking, though—the submission deadline is June 1. Hesperus tends to publish short, more obscure works that are in the public domain and are penned by well-known authors.

The favorite mystery writers of 1941.

The New York Times of April 18, 1941, reported on a survey conducted by Columbia University Press of the readership of its weekly newsletter The Pleasures of Publishing. Respondents reported reading 4.5 mysteries a month (one hopes they eventually finished the half portion) and the following as their favorite writers (in order of popularity):

1. Dorothy L. Sayers
2. Agatha Christie
3. Arthur Conan Doyle
4. Ngaio Marsh
5. Erle Stanley Gardner
6. Rex Stout
7. Ellery Queen
8. Margery Allingham
9. Dashiell Hammett
10. Georges Simenon

Thus the total is 4 Brits, 4 Americans, 1 New Zealand citizen, and 1 Belgian.

Lord Peter Wimsey was voted best detective; Marsh's Death of a Peer (aka A Surfeit of Lampreys, 1940) was deemed the best story read within the past six months, followed by Allingham's Traitor's Purse (1941).

A bully reader: TR's favorite books.

The following is information I've gleaned on some of the favorite books of Theodore Roosevelt from various sources (according to his autobiography [18], he was not allowed to read dime novels when he was a child, which apparently did not thwart him from obtaining a few. He was forbidden to read Ouida's Under Two Flags but did so anyway):

• Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, Little Men, and An Old-Fashioned Girl (according to TR's autobiography)

• James Fenimore Cooper, The Leatherstocking Tales (several sources)
  

• George William Curtis, The Potiphar Papers (according to David McCullough's Mornings on Horseback)

• Dante's Divine Comedy (according to J. A. Zahm—see below for source)
  

• Inazo Nitobe, Bushido (according to Donald Keene's Emperor of Japan)

• William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (according to TR's autobiography)
  

• Theodore S. Van Dyke, The Still-Hunter (on deer hunting; TR blurbed the book)
  

• H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (reported by Wells after his 1906 White House visit)

What TR didn't like to read:

• Hamlet

• Jane Austen

Roosevelt's concentration of mind when reading was quite as remarkable as his ability to read at any and all times and under the most unfavorable circumstances without inconvenience or annoyance. When interested in a book, he seemed to be absolutely dead, for the time being, to all the rest of the world. Noise did not affect him in the least. He could sit in the midst of a talking, shouting crowd and be totally oblivious of and insensible to everything but the contents of the volume in his hands.
— J. A. Zahm, C.S.C., "Theodore Roosevelt as a Hunter-Naturalist," The Outlook 121 (March 1919): 435

About the image: TR reads, ca. 1904. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division