Was founded in 1927 by my grandfather benjamin bass and then onto my father fred bass. Nancy and then onto me. For a little bit of history in the the lighting ten hundreds over this area around the bookstore here in Greenwich Village was the epicenter of publishers and booksellers. Charles and sons was here and the company, design press, they all had editorial offices in ebola, they all add their bookstores to display their new books. Along Fourth Avenue just around on that side, was known as growth. And its it height there were 48 used bookstores which is the sole survivor. We are. As the owner of the stranded widgets 80mile in books, and not easily phased by thousand books. The james on the bucket list, tonight feature book has stopped me in my tracks. [applause]. s expansive scope is coupled with a delightful wit and a perfect die for slide detail. Never again will you have to wonder what to read next. 1,000 books to read before you die is a one stop shop for anybody who likes books. He does not like books. [laughter]. I have to say that i cannot think of a better person to have written the book like this. And james. Than james mustich, princeton graduate with a degree in English Literature and a veteran bookseller, he started his career at a shop in briarcliff working for just 2. 70 an hour. [laughter]. Is moved on as the cofounder and guiding voice for the claimed book catalog, the common reader. Up until recently, he was the Vice President of Digital Products and barnes noble. Everybody is wondering about the future of the books and bookstores at the stranded, id like to say that we are going great. [applause]. Thanks to all of you. And wee are thrilled to have our friends at cspan but to be with us tonight. They are an american treasure and started an amazing job at promoting incredible books. After the format tonight, i will ask james some questions and then we will open up the mike to your questions but first upon staying seated, hope everybody got their literary whiz. [laughter]. No. [laughter]. Youre not doing not it. [laughter]. In 2016, the New York Times challenged narrators to pass the stranded literary whiz job application. Tonight, james and i are challenging you to test your book smarts with a new version of this quiz. The 1,000 books to read before you die quiz. The use of any 21st century device is prohibited in answering these questions. So no, you cannot find a friend, you siri google or alexa. And at the end of the event, james will give us the answers to the quiz and spoiler alert, we have five prizes for the soom to be informed that luckiest of both forms. Our top prize is 100 Gift Certificate for the stranded and it took bag with overflowing with book items including many books from workman press. And now without further ado, please join me in a big warm welcome to james mustich. [applause]. James thank you. Thank you very much. [applause]. Nancy so james, tell us how does this book all take place. James about 15 years ago now, i was approached by this book. Workman had published quite successfully, the thousand places to see before you die. Some of you may know this and it was very successful. And one evening, as i recall, we were having cocktails at the workmans home in connecticut, however the owner of book and publishing is with us tonight. [applause]. And peter said, you know i think we should do one of those books about the thousand things to do. About books and would you like to write it. I without hesitation, yes. Peter used to take u me out for lunch at least every year if not twice a year and he would always talk about you in the book. He died five years ago soi a pat of me, i know he was so fond of you, part of me thinks he must be very proud of this moment that we are all together. I hope that is the case, im pretty sure it is. I think you would be very pleased to see all these people here and to know that so many people are talking about the book and to see such a beautiful execution of the book by the whole team. This was really an extraordinary effort in terms of the design led by janet who is sitting right there, and extraordinary job. [applause] it was almost exactly a year ago today that i sent in the last bit of manuscript for this book. In the book if you have seen it, its 1000 pages long, profusely illustrated, beautifully designed and it went off to the printer in march, between november and march there was a lot of work done in the production and everything is just gorgeous. I think peter would be delighted. Did you read all thousand of the books. I have read the vast majority of them but as you know when youve been a bookseller long enough, there are some books that you talked about so often that you become convinced that you have read them, there are a couple of them that arent like that in here but i become familiar with them. You have the koran and the bible and things like the 9 11 report. It is a pretty broad range of titles but those in fact they did read. Yes. 14 years as a longtime. [laughter] can you describe your process andti eliminating all of the 130 million books that are in. To woodland down to 1000 books. To process and dignifying was a little bit rigor than i had planned. I made a list of books which was several thousand in this was books that i had loved myself or loved selling and grown to love through the advocacy of other readers. You mentioned the catalog that i ran for 20 years as a common reader and that was a wonderful community, you could call it a book blog with a social community of readers except al gore had to invent the internet. So we just printed these catalogs and mail them out and we had hundreds of thousands ofd customers around the country and they would often write in after they purchased books to say that they were delighted to discover them and also recommend other books that they thought belonged to the collection we were making. And my wife margo was here. [applause] as she knows, we still have eight filing cabinets in our basement filled with these letters that people would send us just prompting us to discover new books, to put them in the catalog and even bring some of them back into. He was sitting in the audience and we got a recommendation and he said you know this book and i said no and he said we got together and we did a paperback a addition and sold in the catalog. That kind of reader, enthusiasm for books was the criteria. They wanted to be a book that i wanted to give to someone s and say you have to read this or someone had given to me with the same passion. It was still many more books that could be included, so when i finally decided to do as a framework i was reading a book by edwin wilson, the great literary critic and h at one pot he has a passage about the miscellaneous learning of the bookstore on organized by any large principal. Which seemed to me a perfect rubric for this project. So i said to myself what if i only had 1000 books, had a bookstore and could only have 1000 books and i wanted to have something anyone who might come in looking for a book, that helped me too narroww it down into get the right kind of range that i wanted. I wanted the book to be fun to explore not just kind of a static reference book. You can up a bookstore like this, you can have a chain of 1000. [laughter] we can go into partnership. I think you went beyond, i know you said a thousand books but i look at the end t of the Book Description and you say try this, you have the audiobook and other books written by the author so you kept going on and on. O every book of 8000 has a short essay that i wrote about it to give context and to be an invitation to the book. And then at the end of each of the essays there are and notes which has bibliographic information of when the bookk ws first published, what the best translation may be, and also recommendation for further reading, either other books by the same author or further reading on the subject that the book is about the civil war or world war ii and then also other books to try if you like that one. Also there is about 8500 books referenced in this book and all indexed in the back. Also, i should add because i forget to say this, we built a website, 1000 books to read. Com which is 1000 books to read. Com which has one question at the top, what book should everybody read before they die, has my list, it has the three buttons next to the books i chose and ts a little snippet from the book itself but the buttons are green andto the second button is lifes too short in the third button and readers, all of you can go on to that and add your own books and answers to that question beyond a thousand. There are no cells on the site, it is designed as a tool for stores and libraries and people can come in on their phone to sort the list by genre or subject to find interesting things to read. If you were writing a book, the one book you had to read before you died. Now that i finished it would be this one. For a long time i was not sure i was going to hear. I want to say i love your sub headers and you put the civil war and described it as the american elite and i love the 84 crossroads, he said single white bibliophile companion. You mustve had a lot of fun imagining how to summarize a book in a witty manner. Sometimes they came easily and sometimes they took longer to come up with and actually writing the t essay. It was hard to write short as mark twain once said i am writing the very long letter because i did not have a enough time to write you a short one. [laughter] going back to the choice of which books, did you get pressure from your daughter, wife, publishing to include books because everybody has their opinion, did you feel that . I write anod introduction tht once people know that your writing 1,000 books to read before you die, you can never enjoy dinner party quite the same way again. Because everyone has their own board to put in. I did not feel too much pressure is more the enthusiasm for books that they really loved. So that was part of the fun of the process and for me really part of the fun of the whole project is to promote those questions among readers and among booksellers and librarians. We are just traveling around various stories and libraries across the country promoting the book and that was a lot of fun to talk with audiences like this and bookstores would often have displays of b the book with boos from within the book and i would always say to the book stop, you also have a table of books that you think should be in it that i left out. That is part of the fund. We went down to the table and you are checking out what our choices were. O i think you had everything in the i book. Those are our favorite. Was a hard to sometimes not have the ending of the book in the sub naps like in the end of the fear othe end ofthe affair. Is very conscious of not playwriting any spoilers to the book because i think that wouldk particularly unit would not want to give it away. So i had to rein myself in sometimes. It is hard to figure out what part of the research was knowing enough to know what not to say, for that reason in particular. You went across all genres, young Childrens Books, a lot of travel log, you have interpretation of dreams and you really were so expansive. I wanted to have i beliee that people read the way that they eat. So they might want aay hot dog r lunch one day in the g next day they will go out for a fancy french meal with wine and the whole 9 yards. I think that is important to our reading lives and i wanted the book to represent that to be more of a menu that people would find inviting rather than a prescription that was homework or physical therapy. So i wanted to have something for every type of reading appetite. So you can start this book as a reader if you have willing parents with Good Night Moon and where the wild things are and go all the way through to the comingofage in cs lewis as a grief observed. Its a cradle to cradle reading. Do you want to read your passion. I want to read a little bit from the introduction and will open it up to course under questions. I will start with the line i already used but it leads into other things once people know youre writing a book called 1,000 books to read before you die, you can never enjoy a dinner party in quite the way you did before. No matter how many books you managed to consider, no money how many pages you had written, everynv conversation was a fellw reader and sure to provide new titles to seek out or more worryingly to expose an egregious omission or gapping your knowledge, to say nothing revealing the privileges and prejudices however, unwitting underlying your point of reference. Four years a thousand books felt like too many to get my head around. But now it seems to fuel by several multiples. So let me say what already obvious. This book is neither comprehensive nor authoritative, even if a good number of the title assembled here would be on the most list of essential reading. Its meant to be an invitation to a conversation, evengu an argument about the books and offers that are missing as well as the books and authors included. Because the question of what to read next is the best prelude to more important ones. Like who to be and how to live. In reading and learning and imagination lurches, theres something even lucky enough to take for granted is freedom. Its something i fear that may be forgotten in the great amnesia of in the moment newsfeeds and algorithmically defined identities which hide from our view with the complexity of feelings and ideas that we quietly and determinedly engaged. To get lost in the story or in a study is inherently to acknowledge the voice of another. To broaden ones perspective beyond the confines of one owns andoo understanding. A good book is the opposite, the right book at the right time can expand our lives in the way love does. Making us more thoughtful, generous, brave, more alert to the worlds wonders and in pain by its equities, more lives, more kind. [applause] we would like to ask the question, we ask that you stand up and not be so timid. Go ahead and raise your hand, i can bring you a microphone so you can be heard. Tell me the value of any prizes, pulitzer prize, nobel prize, National Book awards. They werent waited but i did review all of the list of prizewinners to make sure i was not overlooking something. They werent itself except for giving the book easy access to the book in the list of prizes did not mean all that much. Hi jim. Hi marsha. I would like to ask what are you reading now except your pr probably not reading now, if you are not reading now because youre so busy, what is the last book you read. A twopart answer, the last book esr. That i read that i want to recommend to everyone is a book called these troops which is the discovery of the north american competent up until two years ago that is remarkable in being a hundred pages wrong but still very readable. It reveals things that we are grappling with as a country now that has been present from 1776 andd before, its kind of instructive, i recommend that to everyone. The book im a reading now is by an author who is appearing at another event tonight at the China Institute called the three body problem and i am not quite sure how to pronounce his name. It is a marvelous book, a Science Fiction book recommended to me, quite passionately by a reader, i am in the middle of that. There will probably be signed copies left over to. Could you speak a little bit about the challenges in the interesting act specs a reading of something in translation. That is a great question. I tried to be as international as possible given the fact that i was writing for an American Market and predominantly works in english. But there is more than 200 works in translation think we are having a fire drill. The transition, a couple ofor issues, one for the older works because if youre talking about the greek tragedies or any latin, theres many translations. How do you pick the best ones, i was careful to try to do to recommend to people because there is nothing worse than someone picking up a great book like the odyssey and having a translation that is dated or stilted or does not speak to a modern reader. So for those books i was pretty familiar with and recommendeded translations. For classic works, its the same thing, every great book for each new generation has a new translation. In part because the language changes and in part because publishers want to keep it under copyright. But that means there are lots oo choices to make. I was careful there too. What is particularly difficult in terms of works in translation is that any works that we get of contemporary literature that is translated from another culture already filtered by an editor or a publisher who is deciding that this book would appeal to an american or british market. That is whites translated. You never really know if you are actually getting a deep picture of what the literature is of ltanother culture. It is problematic but it is fun. I really love your description, i think one of the interesting follow along questions is book changes when you read them to but you read before. I do think your process of winamp person might be reading your book. Im sure you it differs from whn youre reading it as a child to your daughters. I try to be conscious that i wanted this book to appeal to somebody who was 17 as well as 37 and not just my age so when you read a book when youre younger, it has a certain meaning to you and some books get richer if you. Reporter them when you get older, i think particularly the one by george elliott, my own favorite novel so much i bread every decade since then. It has gotten and then you read other books that were really important, a marvelous book to read when you are young and its important that those books be represented here as well. Its still a marvelous book and not quite as overwhelming as it was when you were 20 yearsot ol. And then there are books that are totally different, i will tell a little story, i was fortunate enough to meet the author Joseph Keller at a cocktail party. At the time i met him his book catch22 had been listed on the list of the Modern Library as 100 bus models of the 20th century. It was number six. I went up to them at this party because he lives down the road from my wifes parents and they said congratulations on the book being so high on the Modern Library list, i said thank you so much but i think they picked the wrong book and he glared at me and said what do you mean. But was a much better book. And he just gloated and said so do i. So i told him about my experience with the book and i read it when it came out in the 1970s i was probably in college and i thought this was the funniest book i have ever read. I memorized whole pages of his description of office life because i found them so amusin