Genres

Books written for children and read by everyone since, alongside the myths and folk tales that arrived by being told aloud long before anyone wrote them down.

The novels and epics that set the terms for everything after them, in editions old enough to be free and good enough to still be read.

First-hand accounts by people who went a very long way from home, usually by sea or ice, and wrote down what it was actually like.

Lives told by the people who lived them, including several written to prove a point that badly needed proving at the time.

Large houses, buried secrets and weather doing far too much work. The nineteenth century at its least restrained and most readable.

Advice on how to live, from Roman emperors to Edwardian self-help, written before the genre had a name and mostly the better for it.

Detection, conspiracy and pursuit, from the stories that invented the modern detective to the ones that invented the spy novel.

Invasions, other worlds and the sense that something very large is paying attention. Where the genre was still deciding what it was.

How to win, how to build and how the people who did it explained themselves afterwards, which is not always the same thing.