Bowie's Bookshelf: The Hundred Books that Changed David Bowie's Life

Books were cool and sexy back then; even cooler and sexier than they are now. (Imagine!) Allen Lane didn’t invent the paperback when, in 1935, he launched Penguin Books, but he used his marketing and entrepreneurial genius to democratize reading, making the world’s best writing available for the price of a packet of cigarettes. Bowie’s postwar generation was the first to take this phenomenon for granted so that by 1966, when the Beatles’ “Paperback Writer” hit number one, the term stood somehow for the takeover of Britain’s creative industries by people from provincial or working-class backgrounds.
Bowie underperformed at school and left in 1963 with just one qualification to his name—a basic O level in art. Given the wide range of interests he subsequently cultivated, this suggests not laziness or an inability to retain information so much as impatience with formal education. Like many autodidacts, Bowie realized early on that he enjoyed teaching himself much more than he enjoyed being taught. And he took huge pleasure in passing on what he had learned to others: when he loved a book, friends say, he would proselytize passionately on its behalf.