Emergence

As well as definitive books, you need a carefully graded way of proceeding through them - plus a very good index. As David Palmer pointed out in his novel Emergence, one would have to devise a 'system to locate specifics in such huge collection. Useless otherwise; researcher could spend most of life looking for data instead of using.' Other critical books should include philosophy and science: it took a long time to build a technological civilization, and the Scientific Method is the cornerstone of this. (And yet even now, much of the world is still mired superstition/religion.) More crucial lessons from John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids: 'The most valuable part of our flying start is knowledge. That's the short cut to save us starting where our ancestors did. We've got it all there in books if we take the trouble to find out about it...…