Editing Western canon (section)

===Classic book===
[[File:William Shakespeare by John Taylor, edited.jpg|thumb|[[Chandos portrait]] of the English playwright and poet [[William Shakespeare]]]]
{{main|Classic book}}
A [[classic]] is a book, or any other work of art, accepted as being exemplary or noteworthy. In the second-century [[Ancient Rome|Roman]] [[miscellany]] ''[[Attic Nights]]'', [[Aulus Gellius]] refers to writers as "classicus... scriptor, non proletarius" ("A distinguished, not a commonplace writer").<ref name="Gellius">{{cite book |last1=Gellius |first1=Aulus |title=Noctes Atticae| pages = Book 19, Par. 8, Line 15|url=https://archive.org/details/auligelliinocte02gellgoog |access-date=5 November 2018 |archive-url=https://archive.org/details/auligelliinocte02gellgoog/page/n3 |archive-date=March 25, 2008|language=la}}</ref> Such classification were initiated with the Greeks' ''ranking'' their cultural works, with the word ''[[wikt:canon|canon]]'' (ancient Greek κανών, kanṓn: "measuring rod, standard").<ref>{{Cite book |editor-last=Gorek |editor-first= Jan |title=Canon Vs. Culture {{!}} Reflections on the Current Debate |chapter=The Origin of the Concept of a Canon and Its Application to the Greek and Latin Classics |first=George A. |last=Kennedy |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=pLVFOkXrAR4C&pg=PA105 |publisher=Routledge |date=2016 |isbn=9781138988064}}</ref> Similarly, early [[Christianity|Christian]] Church Fathers [[Biblical canon|declared as ''canon'']] the authoritative texts of the [[New Testament]], preserving them given the expense of [[vellum]] and [[papyrus]] and mechanical book reproduction. Thus, being included in a ''canon'' ensured a book's preservation as the best way to retain information about a civilization. In contemporary use, the Western canon defines the best of [[Western culture]]. In the ancient world, at the [[Alexandrian Library]], scholars coined the Greek term {{Transliteration|GRC|Hoi enkrithentes}} ["the admitted", "the included"] to identify the writers in the canon. Although the term is often associated with the Western canon, it can be applied to works of literature, music and art, etc. from all traditions, such as the [[Chinese classics]].

With regard to books, what makes a book "classic" has concerned various authors, from [[Mark Twain]] to [[Italo Calvino]], and questions such as "Why Read the Classics?", and "What Is a Classic?" have been considered by others, including [[T. S. Eliot]], [[Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve]], [[Michael Dirda]], and [[Ezra Pound]].

The terms "classic book" and Western canon are closely related concepts, but are not necessarily synonymous. A "canon" is a list of books considered to be "essential", and it can be published as a collection (such as ''[[Great Books of the Western World]]'', [[Modern Library]], [[Everyman's Library]] or [[Penguin Classics]]), presented as a list with an academic's imprimatur (such as [[Harold Bloom]]'s<ref>{{cite book|author=Bloom, Harold|title= The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages|url=https://archive.org/details/westerncanonbook00bloorich|url-access=registration|location= New York|publisher= Harcourt Brace & Company|date= 1994|isbn= 9780151957477}}</ref>), or be the official reading list of a university. In ''[[The Western Canon]]'' Bloom lists "the major Western writers" as [[Dante Alighieri]], [[Geoffrey Chaucer]], [[Miguel de Cervantes]], [[Michel de Montaigne]], [[William Shakespeare]], [[Johann Wolfgang von Goethe]], [[William Wordsworth]], [[Charles Dickens]], [[Leo Tolstoy]], [[James Joyce]] and [[Marcel Proust]].