Man-brary, a man's library, suggestions?

An Introduction to the History of Psychology
B. R. Hergenhahn

Civil Disobedience
Henry David Thoreau

How To Win an Argument
Michael A. Gilbert

The Art of War
Sun Tzu
 
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A good general physics textbook has more useful information than you can shake a stick at.
 
Spike Milligan's Collected War Memoirs
box_set_spike_milligan_war_memoirs.jpg


Bill Bryson

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Jack Londons short stories, and all of C.S. Lewis' non fiction. actually, his fiction would be good too.
 
Non-fiction:
Home Depot's Home Improvement 1-2-3 hardcover
The Ashley Book of Knots
Rigging Handbook 4th Edition by Jerry Klinke
Pocket dictionary
Pocket thesaurus
FM 10-16 General Fabric Repair (sewing manual)
FM 21-76 Survival
FM 21-150 Combatives
Haynes manual for your car
Hunting the Hard Way by Howard Hill

Fiction works of note:
Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce
The Prince by Machiavelli
Any Allan Quartermain novel by H Rider Haggard
Any Tarzan novel by Edgar Rice Burrows
Moby Dick by Herman Melville

These are somewhat political works of fiction and YMMV:
The first 2 Enders Game novels (Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead) by Orson Scott Card
The Red Thunder series (Red Thunder, Red Lightning, Rolling Thunder) by John Varley.
1984 by George Orwell
Brave New World by Aldos Huxley

There's a lot more, but this is all I can think of right now.
 
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Here's a little bit of what I have, that I can see from my desk.

Non-fiction:

Woodcraft and Camping - Sears
Woodworking Basics - Korn
98.6 Degrees: The Art of Keeping Your Ass Alive - Lundin
SAS Survival Handbook - Wiseman
Edible Wild Plants - Elias, Dykeman
Reverence for Wood - Sloane
Measure Twice, Cut Once - Abram
Square Foot Gardening - Bartholomew
Ashley Book of Knots - Ashley
Home Improvement 1-2-3 - Home Depot
Audobon Field Guides (Rocks & minerals, Plants, Trees, Insects, etc.) Take them with you when hiking with the kids
Wilderness Medicine - Forgey
Levine's Guide to Knives and Their Values, Vol. IV - Levine
The Little Book of Whittling - Lubkemann
A People's History of the United States - Zinn
Out of Nowhere: A History of the Military Sniper - Pegler
Gunpowder - Kelly
Guns, Germs and Steel - Diamond
Naval Miscellany - Konstam
D-Day - Deevor
Band of Brothers - Ambrose
Confederates in the Attic - Horwitz
In the Company of Heroes - Durant
Camping and Woodcraft - Kephart
Broca's Brain - Sagan
The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun - Rhodes

Fiction:

Where the Sidewalk Ends and The Light in the Attic - Siverstein (always have something to share with your kids if they're young)
Just So Stories - Kipling
The Hunt For Red October - Clancy
Red Storm Rising - Clancy
Matterhorn - Marlantes
Dune - Herbert
Into the Looking glass, Vorpal Blade, Claws the Catch, Manxome Foe
(Written by John Ringo & Travis Taylor - some of the smartest & most entertaining sci-fi I've ever read.)

Anything/everything by:

J.K Rowling (see note on Silverstein above)
R.L. Wilson (historical writing on Guns, the West, etc.)
Ernest Hemingway
Peter Capstick
J.R.R. Tolkein
Jack London
John Steinbeck
Edgar Allan Poe
H.P. Lovecraft

Misc:

subscription to Backwoodsman magazine
repair manual for any vehicle you currently have
Anarchist Cookbook
a journal (several short entries a week)

~Chris
 
How To Stay Alive in the Woods (Bradford Angier)
Survival Wisdom and Know-How (Stackpole Books)
One Man's Wilderness (Richard Proenneke)
Shelters Shacks & Shanties (D.C. Beard)
Charles Bukowski
Kurt Vonnegut
Mark Twain
John Muir
 
leghog said:
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
A Farewell to Arms
All Quiet on the Western Front
Animal Farm
The Art of War
The Bible, both testaments
Call of the Wild
Captains Courageous
Davy Crockett
The Defence Of Duffer's Drift
For Whom the Bells Toll
The Grapes of Wrath
The Hobbit
The Journals of Lewis and Clark
Man-Eaters of Tsavo
Moby Dick
Paths of Glory
The Poetry of Robert Frost
The Red Badge of Courage
Slaughter House Five
Stirling's Desert Raiders
A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf
Twelve O'clock High
To Kill a Mockingbird
Walden
Click to expand...

Great list, add The Old Man and The Boy.

Tom
 
Deep survival

the bowyers bible

Gray's anatomy

not sure how old you are but a few pairs of inexpensive reading glasses stuck on the shelf couldn't hurt.
 
A lot of the books mentioned are great and have a lot of illustrations, and need to be physical books. While on the other hand, a lot of them are strictly readers. You can run out of space and shelving pretty quick, as my wife did as an avid reader and book collector. We had one bedroom converted into our "library" with shelves on three walls from floor to ceiling. I bought her a Kindle and convinced her to at least try it out. She now loves it and I don't have to find room for any more book shelves. She has about 350 books on her kindle, and carries it in her purse whenever she goes any where that she may have time to read. A lot of the older classics mentioned are available free on the Kindle, or for little money. The books, once purchased from Amazon, are on their site stored under your account name for further retrieval should something happen to your device or if lost, so you don't loose the books once purchased. That may be an option if you don't already have one or something similar.

Blessings,

Omar
 
A couple vintage joke books, while hanging in the grandfather in laws man cave, there were jokes I had never seen before and I laughed for quite a while. I'm the kinda guy who has to memorize jokes so when I tell them I'm not the one laughing. Sadly Alzheimers disease taking him away.

For knowledge, a current encyclopedia, a book of world records, an anarchists cookbook, a chemistry book may be informative and a good source of entertainment. A basic electronics book now is what I imagine the analogue for some of the old general knowledge books. Almanacs, they're great to have around.

Someone mentioned the home depot DIY books, I second that.

In an electricity free world, sundials marked time and in their locality, individuals could probably tell you the time +/- 15 minutes, so I'd recommend a book on sundials.
Most places have literature on the local history or traditions from many perspectives, my home state has so many books about it that I'd be hard pressed to read them all in a year, many of them while entertaining also have nuggets of wisdom that might not be observable to an outsider.

A good book on water filtration, sewage management, car repair (prices are getting better for manuals, maybe a local mechanic or library is tired of a forgotten repair manual).

I love books, I love reading and so long as your shelf has something to make the mind wander, it will be good because a stagnant mind is all but dead.
 
Read and memorize "IF" by Rudyard Kipling. Every man, well read or not should know it.

The Art of Manliness: Classic Skills and Manners for the Modern Man by McKay

How to keep your volkswagen alive by Muir (Theres always a VW around you might need for something)

An Axe to Grind, US Forest Service (free .pdf on the net)

Ballistics, by Collins


-Xander
 
If you don't mind warrior philosophy, I would also like to add suggestion for Hagakure by Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
My favorite book propably.
 
Have a poster or painting of Theodore Roosevelt's speech "The Critic" on the wall
 
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