Classic nonfiction

Not every essential book is a novel. This list gathers the nonfiction in the Bibliomancer library: the private notebooks of a Roman emperor; a Florentine civil servant’s analysis of how power is really won and kept; an American’s account of two years in a cabin by a pond, with the essay on conscience and the state that grew out of it; and the narrative of a man who taught himself to read in slavery and wrote his way to freedom.

What they share is plainness of purpose. None of them was written to be admired; each was written to work something out — how to live, how states behave, what a person owes the law, what slavery is. That is why they are still read by people who are not studying them.

Where a book was written in another language, we say which translation we use and when it was made: George Long’s Meditations (1862) and W. K. Marriott’s Prince (1908), both long-standing English versions whose copyright has expired. Every text is complete, free to read online, and available in print.