In 2014, artist Ruth Beale explored the idea of the public library in the twenty-first century in a solo show at Peckham Platform (then Peckham Space). The exhibition included an Autodidact Library of “teach yourself” books on science, art, music, the way things work and dictionaries.
The artist collated a small collection of books as a starting point for those interested in this approach. You will find books by or about autodidacts and self-education, and books selected to aid the autodidact in their learning.
Anarchist Pedagogies, Ed. Robert H. Haworth
Astronomy by Patrick Moore
Autodidact and I Dare to be Different by Julio Hernandez
Bouvard et Pecuchet by Gustave Flaubert
By the Pricking of My Thumbs by Agatha Christie
Darwin for Beginners by Borin Van Loon and Jonathan Miller
Does Anything Eat Wasps? By Mick O’Hare
Education Automation by Buckminster Fuller
Electricity and Magnetism by Satya Prakash
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemmingway
Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
How to Build Your Own Living Structures by Ken Isaacs
Keywords by Raymond Williams
Learning all the Time by John Holt
Leonardo by Ernest Raboff
Life on Earth by David Attenbrough
Mathematics Made Simple by Abraham P. Sperling and Monroe Stuart
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
Oxford Compact Thesaurus
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo Friere
Principia Ethica by G.E. Moore
Reading H ayy Ibn-Yaq z an: A Cross-Cultural History of Autodidacticism by Avner Ben-Zaken
Rivers, Lakes and Marshes by Brian Whitton
Self-taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom by Heather Andrea Williams
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
The Day I Became an Autodidact by Kendall Hailey
The Discovery of the Child by Maria Montessori
The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation by Walter Horace Bruford
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
The Ignorant Schoolmaster by Jacque Ranciere
The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes by Jonathan Rose
The Skeleton and Movement by Brian R Ward
The Total Library by Jorges Luis Borges
The Universal Book of Hobbies and Handicrafts, Ed. Sid G Hedges
The Way Things Work by David McCaulay
The Witchcraft Reader by Darren Oldridge
The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
Travellers and Explorers by Iqra Trust
Ukelele Method Book 1 by Hal Leonard
Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett
List updated November 2021
