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Earlier this month, we stumbled across Carolyn Kellogg’s great article about Bernie Madoff’s book collection, parts of which are being sold slowly on eBay by the person who won Madoff’s books in an auction. Sure, the books someone has may not be as great an indicator of their personality as, er, some other things we know about them, but, nerds that we are, we tend to consider our libraries extensions of ourselves. So of course, we did a little digging, pouring through the collections of famous (or infamous) cultural icons and see what they were made of. After the jump, browse through our excerpts of the private libraries of everyone from Darwin to Houdini to Oprah, and draw your conclusions where you may.

Bernie Madoff

Purple America, Rick Moody
Billy Bathgate, E.L. Doctorow
The Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri
The Robber Bride, Margaret Atwood
Riding the Rap, Elmore Leonard
Black Money, Michael Thomas
When Genius Failed, Roger Lowenstein
Original Sin, P.D. James
The Liars’ Club, Mary Karr
Disclosure, Michael Crichton
Self Defense, Jonathan Kellerman
Nest of Vipers, Linda Davies
The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe
Without Remorse, Tom Clancy
Deception, Philip Roth
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky

Plus: “There are big bestsellers by Leon Uris, Caleb Carr, David Baldacci and Sidney Sheldon, dictionaries and other reference books, and histories and biographies by David Halberstam, Walter Isaacson, David McCullough and Doris Kearns Goodwin. Classics by Cervantes, Willa Cather and Mark Twain… Stacks of Philp Roth… Collections of poems by Emily Dickinson, Lord Byron and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Books by Norman Mailer and Elie Wiesel… The stories of Wallace Stegner.”

[via The LA Times]

David Foster Wallace

Some highlights from the 300-odd volumes of Wallace’s personal library now held by the Harry Ransom Center:

Safety of Objects, A.M. Homes
Darconville’s Cat, Alexander Theroux
The Mystery of the Aleph: Mathematics, the Kabbalah, and the Search for Infinity, Amir D. Aczel
Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting, J. Hoberman And Jeffrey Shandler
The Principles of Mathematics, Bertrand Russell
The Problems of Philosophy, Bertrand Russell
Writing Past Dark : Envy, Fear, Distraction and Other Dilemmas in the Writer’s Life, Bonnie Friedman
Myths to Live By, Joseph Campbell ; Foreword By Johnson E. Fairchild
Desperate Characters: A Novel, Paula Fox ; With An Afterword By Irving Howe
All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West, Cormac McCarthy
Suttree, Cormac McCarthy
The Puttermesser Papers: A Novel, Cynthia Ozick
Nightwood, Djuna Barnes
The Complete Stories, Flannery O’Connor
The Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism, Fritjof Capra
Metalogic: An Introduction to the Metatheory of Standard First Order Logic, Geoffrey Hunter
Insect Biology: A Textbook of Entomology, Howard E. Evans
The Ultimate Rip-Off : A Taxing Tale, Iris Weil Collett
Play It As It Lays: A Novel, Joan Didion
Uses of Infinity, Leo Zippin
Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form, Matthea Harvey
Compassion and Self Hate: An Alternative to Despair, Theodore I. Rubin
Change Your Mind: A practical guide to Buddhist meditation, Paramananda
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Translated, and with an introduction, by Burton Raffel ; afterword by Neil D. Isaacs
Pretty much all of Don DeLillo

[Check out the complete (and searchable!) list here]

Oprah

Oprah has something like 1,500 volumes in her personal library. A few of her favorites:

Tales of the South Pacific, James A. Michener
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee (her favorite book of all time)
Cup of Gold, John Steinbeck

Plus: “Now I have all of Langston Hughes, all of Paul Laurence Dunbar; Zora Neale Hurston—all of her writing.”

[via Oprah]

Mark Twain

A selection of more than 200 of the books Mark Twain donated to a small library in Redding, CT, from his own collection.

Departmental Ditties, Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses, Rudyard Kipling
Around the World in 80 Days, Jules Verne
The Club of Queer Trades, G.K. Chesterson
Memoirs of Hans Hendrik, the Arctic Traveller
Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, Jane Austen
The Cats’ Convention, Eunice Gibbs Allyn
Little Lord Fauntleroy, Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Log of a Sea-Waif: Being Recollections of the First Four Years of my Sea Life, F.T Bullen
Oriental Rambles, George W., Dr Caldwell
Bird Homes. The Nests Eggs and Breeding Habits of the land Birds, Arthur R. Dugmore
Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy
A Boy I Knew, Four Dogs and Some More Dogs, Laurence Hutton
The Water-Babies. A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby, Charles Kinglsey
Letters of Edward Lear Author of “The Book of Nonsense, to Chichester Fortescue, Lord Carlingford and Frances, Countess Waldegrave. Edited by Constance, Lady Strachey, Edward Lear

Also: “Many of his books concern topics Twain explored in his own writing, like Hiram Chittenden’s history of steamboat navigation and Josiah Flynt Willard’s study of tramps, with its glossary of terms… He owned classics like Epictetus, the Koran and the Bible, and kept up with contemporaries like H. G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Charles Darwin and Victor Hugo.”

[via The New York Times]

Charles Darwin

Most of Darwin’s personal library is available to read, annotations and all, online. Here are a few highlights:

The American beaver and his works, Lewis H. Morgan
The anatomy and philosophy of expression, Charles Bell
The beginnings of life : being some account of the nature, modes of origin and transformations of lower organisms. Vol. I. , Henry Charlton Bastian
Botany for young people: Part 2, How plants behave, Asa Gray
Cattle: Their breeds, management, and diseases, William Youatt
Conjectures concerning the cause, and observations upon the phaenomena of earthquakes, John Michell
The dovecote and the aviary, Edmund Saul Dixon
Flowers and their unbidden guests, Anton Kerner von Marilaun
Inquiries concerning the intellectual powers and the investigation of truth, John Abercrombie
The Italian alp-bee, H.C. Hermann
The physiology or mechanism of blushing, Thomas Henry Burgess
Seasons with the Sea-Horses : or, sporting adventures in the northern seas, James Lamont

[via BHL]

Marilyn Monroe

Some highlights:

Joan of Lorraine, a play in two acts, Maxwell Anderson
Sexual impotence in the male, Leonard Paul Wershub
From Hiroshima to the moon; chronicles of life in the atomic age, Daniel Lang
Doctor Pygmalion : the autobiography of a plastic surgeon, Maxwell Maltz
Out of my later years: Essays, Albert Einstein
Common sense and nuclear warfare, Bertrand Russell
The poems, prose, and plays of Alexander Pushkin
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
The portable Chekhov
The Dead Sea scrolls, Millar Burrows
What is a Jew?, Morris Norman Kertzer
Flower arranging for fun, Hazel Peckinpaugh Dunlop
The Wisdom of the Sands, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The Complete Poems, Edgar Allan Poe
The poetical works of John Milton
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the looking glass and The hunting of the snark, Lewis Carroll
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham
The Mark of the Warrior, Paul Scott
A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
Sons and Lovers, D.H. Lawrence
Ulysses, James Joyce

[via LibraryThing]

Tupac Shakur

Some highlights:

The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli
Serving Humanity: A Compilation, Alice A. Bailey
The Wisdom of Insecurity, Alan Watts
Teachings of the Buddha, Jack Kornfield
The Imitation of Christ, Thomas à Kempis
Black Sister: Poetry by Black American Women, 1746-1980
Blues People: Negro Music in White America, Imamu Amiri [LeRoi Jones] Baraka
The Art of War, Sun Tzu
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
The Life And Words Of Martin Luther King Jr., Ira Peck
At the Bottom of the River, Jamaica Kincaid
The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Dubois
The Diary of Anais Nin, 1931-1934
The Visionary Poetics of Allen Ginsberg, Paul Portuges
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values, Robert M. Pirsig
Still I Rise, Maya Angelou
The Tibetan Book of the Dead, W.Y. Evans-Wentz
The Phenomenon of Man, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

[via LibraryThing]

Harry Houdini

Some highlights:

Evenings at home in spiritual séance : prefaced and welded together by a species of autobiography, Georgiana Houghton
Modern American spiritualism : a twenty years’ record of the communion between earth and the world of spirits, Emma Hardinge Britten
The fashionable science of parlour magic : being the newest tricks of deception, developed and illustrated : with an exposure of the practices made use of by professional card players, blacklegs, and gamblers : to which is added for the first time The magic of spirit rapping, writing mediums, and table turning, &c., &c., J. H. Anderson
Ghost land, or, Researches into the mysteries of occultism : illustrated in a series of autobiographical sketches : in two parts, William Britten
Trilby : a novel, George Du Maurier
Émile Zola, novelist and reformer; an account of his life & work, Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
The life of P. T. Barnum, written by himself
Is spiritualism a humbug? : also some facts on misdirection, Adam Hull Shirk
Hypnotism, magnetic healing, and mind reading made easy, C. O. Lorenz

[via LibraryThing]

Jeff Buckley

Some highlights:

The Plague, Albert Camus
The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead, William S. Burroughs
Death on Credit, Louis-Ferdinand Céline
The Mushroom Man, Ethel Pochocki
Selected Poems of Ezra Pound
Laughable Loves, Milan Kundera
Nightwood, Djuna Barnes
Written on the Body, Jeanette Winterson
A Feast of Snakes, Harry Crews
The Captain’s Verses, Pablo Neruda
The Unabomber Manifesto: Industrial society and its future, F.C.
A Season in Hell, Arthur Rimbaud
The Blood of a Poet, Jean Cocteau
Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
Crazy Cock, Henry Miller
Green Shadows, White Whale, Ray Bradbury
Selected Poems of Anne Sexton
The dream dictionary : the key to your unconscious, Jo Jean Boushahla
Hypnotism Made Easy, Marie Nimier
Leon Trotsky : a biography, Ronald Segal
Please kill me : the uncensored oral history of punk, Legs McNeil
Never mind the bollocks : women rewrite rock, Amy Raphael
The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
Rock stars in their underpants, Paula Yates
Various positions : a life of Leonard Cohen, Ira Bruce Nadel
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie

[via LibraryThing]

Emily Dickinson

A selection:

The Mill on the Floss, George Eliot
The Marble Faun, Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Poetical Works of George Herbert
Confessions of an English opium-eater : and, Suspiria de profundis, Thomas De Quincey
The poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The Professor, Charlotte Brontë
The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth
Walden, Henry David Thoreau
The princess; a medley, Baron Alfred Tennyson
The Poetical Works, Percy Bysshe Shelley
The Comedies, Histories, Tragedies and Poems of William Shakespeare
Paradise Lost, John Milton
Life of George Washington, Washington Irving
Faust, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
The frugal housewife : dedicated to those who are not ashamed of economy, Mrs. Child
Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes
Wuthering Heights, Ellis Bell (Emily Brontë)
Prometheus Bound, and Other Poems, Elizabeth Barrett Browning

[via LibraryThing]