Browse the bookshelves of Darwin, Austen, Bowie and other famous readers

What did Charles Darwin keep on his shelves? Which novels did George Orwell think were rubbish? BookSense now has nineteen pages of famous readers' books, each one built from a catalogue or from the person's own words, and every book on them links to its page here.

Where to find them

Open Browse at the top of any page and choose the Famous readers tab, or go straight to Famous readers' libraries. Each card shows a few covers from that shelf and how many books it holds.

Two kinds of shelf

Some pages are real libraries: the books a person owned, as libraries and scholars have catalogued them. Charles Darwin's library has the 785 scientific books his son gave to Cambridge, from the 1908 catalogue. Virginia and Leonard Woolf's has 4,435 books from Monk's House, their home in Sussex. Herman Melville's, Mark Twain's, Sylvia Plath's and David Foster Wallace's are here too, along with the libraries of John Adams and Benjamin Franklin.

The others are books people recommended or wrote about: David Bowie's 100 favourite books, the reading lists in Stephen King's On Writing, Barack Obama's summer lists, Oprah's Book Club, the books in Warren Buffett's shareholder letters and the ones Bill Gates has reviewed. Borges, Nabokov, Jane Austen, Orwell and Gandhi have pages made from what they wrote about the books they read.

What's on each page

• The best-known books on the shelf come first, with their covers.
• Then every book, sorted by author. Each title opens the book's own page, with what it's about and where to get it.
• Where the person said what they thought, the book carries a short label such as "loved it" or "despised it", often with a line in their own words and where they wrote it.
• At the bottom, a folded list of titles the catalogue names that we couldn't match to a book, and the catalogue or source the page comes from.

The verdicts are the fun part. Jane Austen wrote to her sister that they were reading Clarentine "and are surprised to find how foolish it is." Gandhi said of Ruskin's Unto This Last: "I determined to change my life in accordance with the ideals of the book." Orwell's page has a plain verdict on 27 books, from Gulliver's Travels, which he loved, to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, which he didn't. Books someone disliked never sit in the covers at the top.

See which books you share

This works once you're signed in and have books in My books. Add them by searching for a book and saving it, or bring your whole shelf over with Import from Goodreads on the My books page. Then open any famous reader's page: a box near the top tells you how many of their books you have, and lists them. There's nothing to set up, and nobody else sees it.

Where to start

• If you want something to read next, start with Bowie's 100 or Stephen King's lists: books they loved and wanted other people to read.
• If you like an argument, try Orwell: 215 books, and he didn't hold back.
• If you like history, John Adams's library has the 1,049 books he gave to his town of Quincy in 1822, and Franklin's are still at the library he helped found.