What follows is a personal selection of some less well-known classics. “Few people love the writings of Sir Thomas Browne,” wrote Virginia Woolf, for example, about the esoteric 17th-century essayist, “but those that do are the salt of the earth.” So I recommend striking out and investigating those more shadowy shelves. There’s even a particular pleasure when you make a literary connection and you know you’re among a limited number of initiates. This is the brilliant paradox at the heart of a classic: it may have been written centuries ago, but its kernel of truth still feels startlingly contemporary.So it doesn’t matter how many people admire a classic the important thing is what it can do to you. There are three essential criteria for defining a classic: it must have endured a number of years it must have intrinsic literary quality but, most crucially, it must still be alive, to be able to connect with readers, thrilling them with flashes of recognition and revelation. You might ask whether a book can justify the term “classic” if it only has a handful of readers. But as well as its grand galleries and corridors, its illustrious authors and literary landmarks, it has plenty of secret rooms and hidden corners, filled with titles that fewer people read, and these can be just as rewarding to explore. It features all the most famous works of world literature, from Homer’s Odyssey to Ulysses by James Joyce. T he world’s largest library of classic literature is the Penguin Classics series, which has more than 1,200 titles in print.
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