📚 Anecdotes

The short tale told for the point: anecdote as history’s spice, and the collections that kept it.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject anecdotes in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	Tradiciones peruanas	Ricardo Palma	1893	53
	"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman"	Richard Phillips Feynman	1984	45
	Is sex necessary?, or, why you always feel the way you do	James Thurber	1929	43
	How to Fail in Literature (Reprint)	Andrew Lang	1890	40
	An Anthropologist on Mars	Oliver Sacks	1995	34
	Kitchen Confidential	Anthony Bourdain	2000	28
	This is going to hurt	Adam Kay	2017	27
	The Goshawk (A Viking compass book, C291)	T. H. White	1951	26
	Uncommon law	Alan Patrick Herbert	1935	25
	The theory & practice of gamesmanship	Stephen Potter	1940	23
	Herr und Hund	Thomas Mann	1923	21
	Complications	Atul Gawande	2002	20
	Chicken Soup for the Soul	Jack Canfield	1993	19
	Nigger	Dick Gregory	1965	18
	The Peter principle	Laurence J. Peter	1969	18
	Biology Now	Anne Houtman	2015	18
	Chicken Soup for the Pet Lover's Soul	Jack Canfield	1998	17
	Abraham Lincoln's stories and speeches	Abraham Lincoln	1894	15
	Bad Feminist	Roxane Gay	2014	15
	Without feathers	Woody Allen	1975	13
	A Big Little Life	Dean Koontz	2009	13
	Chicken every Sunday	Rosemary Taylor	1943	12
	In-laws and outlaws	C. Northcote Parkinson	1962	12
	Rescuing Sprite	Mark R. Levin	2007	12
	Smoke gets in your eyes	Caitlin Doughty	2014	12
	All the dogs of my life	Elizabeth von Arnim	1936	11
	James Herriot's favourite dog stories	James Herriot	1995	11
	The Orchid Thief	Susan Orlean	1998	11
	Cat stories	James Herriot	1994	10
	Never Split the Difference	Chris Voss	2016	10

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 05 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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Want the ideas behind these books explained rather than listed? Try Study for short explainers, Academy for deeper tracks, and the periodic table or the night sky when the book is about matter or stars.