October is National Reading Group Month, promoting book groups for bringing people together via great books. Here are some classic works that celebrate the power of the written word.

In Praise of Books: With suggestions from influential thinkers and authors, this work can help those who are developing a personal library or reading list. Ralph Waldo Emerson contributed an Atlantic Monthly essay to this volume, in which he recommended his favorite writers and texts. He named Homer, Shakespeare, Herodotus, Dante, Spenser, Bacon, Dickens, and Thackeray as among his most cherished authors. Emerson also listed his three criteria for selecting a book: never read a book that is less than a year old, always read well-known books, and always read topics that one enjoys. Sir John Lubbock also shared his love of books — “How thankful we ought to be for these inestimable blessings, for this numberless host of friends who never weary, betray, or forsake us!” he wrote — before recommending the works of Confucius, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Darwin, Goethe, Eliot, and many more. Also included are quotes about reading and books from Socrates (”Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings; so you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for”), Niccolo Machiavelli (”I forget every vexation” when reading), Alexander Pope (”At this day, as much company as I have kept, and as much as I love it, I love reading better”), Henry Fielding (”We are as liable to be corrupted by books as by companions”), David Hume (”[I] was seized very early with a passion for literature, which as been the ruling passion of my life”), and other avid readers.

The Love of Books: The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury: British writer and bishop Richard Aungerville (1287–1345), aka Richard de Bury, was a royal tutor and a player in court intrigue, and is today perhaps the most famous book lover of the medieval world. Owner of an immense personal library, the bishop penned this valentine to the wisdom of books and the joy of collecting them, most likely completing it just before his death. (This, considered the definition English edition, was translated by Oxford scholar Ernest C. Thomas and first published in 1888.) Delightfully expansive in its bibliomania, the Philobiblon waxes rhapsodic about: “The Degree of Affection That Is Properly Due to Books,” “Why We Have Not Wholly Neglected the Fables of the Poets,” “Who Ought to Be Special Lovers of Books,” “The Advantages of the Love of Books,” and much more.

Bibliography of Forbidden Books - Volume I: In this first volume of the 1877 work that established him as England’s leading authority on pornography, Henry Spencer Ashbee describes scores of “curious, uncommon and erotic books” that were banned or otherwise prohibited from legitimate sale during the Victorian era… and some even until the 1960s. Included in this far-reaching volume are such “gentlemen only” titles as Exhibition of Female Flagellants, The Battles of Venus, and A Cabinet of Amorous Curiosities. This catalog of mostly forgotten works is an invaluable-and highly entertaining-resource for bibliophiles, students of erotica, and collectors of Victoriana. Also avaiable: Volume II and Volume III.