Theodore Roosevelt
Like no other president, Theodore Roosevelt consumed books at an awe-inspiring rate of one a day when busy and two to three when he had a free evening, according to biographer Edmund Morris. He was an omnivorous reader, happy to consume any sort of book because it both satisfied his natural curiosity and afforded him a few moments of “complete rest and complete detachment from the fighting of the moment.” But few authors influenced his military career and presidency more than Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan. His seminal military text, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, was largely responsible for shaping Roosevelt’s imperialistic thought. Naturalist writers, such as Audubon and Spencer Fullerton Baird, also spoke to his penchant for the natural sciences and made the preservation of America’s natural beauty one of his priorities.
John F Kennedy
Known forever for his youthful looks and racy behavior, Kennedy might seem a surprising inclusion in this list, but he is one of the few presidents to have a bona fide bestseller, Profiles in Courage, before he even served. Any man that asked Robert Frost to read at his inauguration and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. to join his Cabinet must have a passion for literature, and Kennedy was an impressive and wide-ranging reader, with an Anglophile bent in his taste for John Buchan’s thrillers, Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Churchill’s biography of Marlborough.
Abraham Lincoln
Few presidents are as famous for their elegant a d profound writing and speeches as Lincoln and yet no other president had as little formal education as he did. But from an early age he read and reread The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan and Aesop’s Fables, before moving on to Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, Shakespeare and the Romantic poets. Lincoln read deeply in the classics but, according to David Herbert Donald’s Lincoln, “fiction did not interest him.” While he had a small library compared to others, he was the deepest reader of the lot. Lincoln’s favourite books included Aesop’s Fables, Hamlet, Macbeth, Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyon, A History of General George Washington by Parson Weems and The Bible.
Thomas Jefferson
When the British burned the 3,000-volume Library of Congress, the president with a self-described “canine appetite for reading” stepped in. He immediately offered Congress between 9,000 and 10,000 volumes from his personal collection as a replacement—Congress ultimately took the entire collection, which amounted to 6,487. Jefferson read so copiously, even in languages like French, Italian, and Spanish, that he once designed a rotating bookstand that allowed him to consult five books at a time. He also devoted the latter years of his life to collecting, building relationships with every bookseller in New York and Philadelphia, along with many more across the Atlantic. For the range of his reading, he comes in third.
Richard Nixon
“As you know, I kind of like to read books. I am not educated, but I do read books.” In his farewell speech as president, Richard Nixon took the time to make this defensive but true remark. While no intellectual, as he was fond of pointing out, Nixon was an avid reader, who, according to Conrad Black, would often retreat to a secret room in the Old Executive Office to read and nap. His favorite authors were Tolstoy and the conservative historian Paul Johnson.
