'The Booklovers', a track from The Divine Comedy's 1994 cult album 'Promenade', lists 73 writers, canonical, or who could have been considered literary must-reads in Britain and Ireland at the time. Each author has a line that 'greets' the listener, sometimes with an allusive joke or an audio clip from a film or TV show. Malcolm Bradbury's greeting names Steinbeck & Salinger, rounding the list up to 75, so I've included them too.
The lines at the beginning of the song are a clip of Audrey Hepburn in 'Funny Face', and the chorus "Happy the man..." adapts lines from John Dryden's poem 'Imitation of Horace' (1685). Similar lines directly quoting 'Imitation of Horace' also close the album.
If a young well-read pop singer wrote something similar now, 25 years later, I've no doubt the list would look rather different and more diverse. But for me, a teenager in 1994, this became one of *the* definitive lists of classic and contemporary writers.
