Canon Shelf

In this repository, we compile literary canons and other lists of literary works in a machine-readable format. To ensure both ease of editing and human readability, we use the TSV (Tab-Separated Values) format. For other use cases, the lists can be readily converted to JSON or a range of other formats.

Overview

• 2006-1001-books
• 2019-100-notable-books-in-ukrainian
• 2024-spiegel-canon
• 2024-nzz-canon
• 2025-spiegel-canon-international
• 2025-zeit-canon

Co-authorship, series titles, time format

Co-authorships and book series cannot be rendered adequately in a table. We modeled them as follows to make it easy to be transformed into JSON:

Co-authorship

List Number	Series Number	Author	Author_Wikidata_ID	Author_GND_ID	Title	Publication_City	Publisher	Publisher_Wikidata_ID	Work_Goodreads_ID	Work_GND_ID	Publication_Date
29		Merz, Carl	Q43866	115661018	Der Herr Karl	München	Langen Müller	Q1194235	4290497	4583169-5	1961
29		Qualtinger, Helmut	Q45233	118828983	Der Herr Karl	München	Langen Müller	Q1194235	4290497	4583169-5	1961

Series titles

List Number	Series Number	Author	Author_Wikidata_ID	Author_GND_ID	Title	Work_Wikidata_ID	Work_Goodreads_ID	Work_GND_ID	Publication_Date	Publication_Country
25		Simone de Beauvoir	Q7197	118507877	Die Mandarins von Paris	Q1214721	20761		1954	Frankreich
26	0	J. R. R. Tolkien	Q892	118623222	Der Herr der Ringe	Q15228	3462456	4124318-3	{1954;1955}	Großbritannien
26	1	J. R. R. Tolkien	Q892	118623222	Die Gefährten	Q208002	3204327	4675755-7	1954	Großbritannien
26	2	J. R. R. Tolkien	Q892	118623222	Die zwei Türme	Q332388	2963845	4675756-9	1954	Großbritannien
26	3	J. R. R. Tolkien	Q892	118623222	Die Rückkehr des Königs	Q332581	2964424	4675758-2	1955	Großbritannien
27		Patricia Highsmith	Q270635	11855087X	Der talentierte Mr. Ripley	Q472026	1817520		1955	USA

If multiple entries share the same list number and include series numbers, they represent parts of a series. In such cases, the entry with series number 0 is the series title. If there are no series numbers, identical list numbers indicate co-authorship of a single work.

Time format

Publication years follow the EDTF (Extended Date/Time Format) standard. This is especially relevant for multi-volume works published over several years. In these instances, we specify the individual publication years, i. e. 1970–1983 → {1970,1971,1973,1983}.

License and Ways to Get Involved

These lists of literary works are freely available for your research and exploration under a CC0 license. We also welcome contributions, feel free to share your own lists with us.

Team

• Jonas Rohe (@Fera333)
• Frank Fischer (@lehkost)
• Lisa Poggel (@lipogg)
• Viktor Illmer (@v-ji)