“The list is the origin of culture,” said Umberto Eco back in 2009. “It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible.” As curator of an exhibition of lists at the Louvre, the Italian novelist had skin in the game at the time, but his point remains pertinent in an ever more infinite world.
How, for instance, could one hope to comprehend the scope of a UK publishing industry in which more than 660m books – physical and digital – are sold in a single year, including about 180,000 new titles? The answer, insofar as there is one, is to arrange them into lists, from publishers’ catalogues, via library and bookshop shelves, all the way down to personal must-reads gleaned from friends or other trusted sources.
