About the Book
John Cowper Powys — novelist, and by 1916 a formidable travelling lecturer in America — made this list for G. Arnold Shaw of New York. The motto on the title page is AERE PERENNIUS: more lasting than bronze.
His preface is the best part. Other such selections, he says, are “designed to stuff the minds of young persons with an accumulation of ‘standard learning’ calculated to alarm and discourage the boldest.” His is frankly subjective, the choice of one man wandering at large through these realms of gold, made for people who read for pleasure and have “no sinister wish to transform themselves… into what are called ‘cultivated persons.’”
The reward he promises the reader who finishes his hundred is not cultivation but company: they will become “a person with whom it would be a delight to share that most classic of all pleasurable arts — the art of intelligent conversation.”