12 Books That Changed the World

There are no novels in Melvyn Bragg’s list of earth-shattering books and that is as it should be, writes Peter Ackroyd. The publishers’ catalogues have been filled, for years, with lists of books on significant objects or events that have changed the world, from the cultivation of tulips to the calculation of longitude, from flowers and eggs to medicines and Islamic inventors. Among this welter of items, however, books would seem to have a definite advantage in the claim to pre-eminence. The Western world, after all, became the world of the book.