About this list

Bookman.com, 100 Books

The “100 Favorite Novels of Librarians” list was put together by Brodart Book Services as an informal, grassroots rejoinder to the Modern Library “100 Best” splash of 1998. Marc Sheaffer—then a marketing manager at Brodart—posted an open note to library list-servs that autumn titled “The Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century: Who Is to Judge?” and invited colleagues to e-mail him their own five all-time favourite novels. Over the next six months (September 1998 → March 1999) he tallied every ballot and ranked the one hundred most-mentioned titles, releasing the results as a single-page flyer and on Brodart’s now-defunct Bookman.com site.
lsv.arlisna.org
librarything.com

Unfortunately, almost everything beyond that headline data has vanished. The original PDF/HTML isn’t in the Wayback Machine, trade magazines never printed the final flyer, and neither Brodart nor Sheaffer published a voter roll or even a head-count. What survives are fragmentary list-serv messages that prove the call for votes, plus countless second-hand reposts (LibraryThing, Goodreads, ListChallenges and even Pinterest) that repeat the dates but add no methodology. In other words, we can document when and why the list was made—and that librarians were simply asked for their personal top-five—but not how many librarians responded or whether any weighting scheme was applied. Until someone uncovers a surviving copy of the 1999 Brodart flyer, the list remains a fascinating yet mist-shrouded snapshot of late-1990s librarian taste.

This list was originally published in 1999 and was added to this site almost 12 years ago.