Smithsonian Magazine Best Books of the Year

About the Smithsonian Magazine Best Books of the Year

Smithsonian magazine's year-end "Ten Best" subject lists, one category per list: History, Science, Travel, Food and Children's for 2017-2025, and Photography for 2017 and 2020-2025. Each list has ten books; none is ranked. The 2018 and 2019 best-books hubs link no photography list, so those years have none. robots.txt allows all agents, but Cloudflare blocks scripted fetches of smithsonianmag.com, so pages were read from copies. 2017-2019 lists and all Photography lists come from Wayback Machine copies of the Smithsonian articles. 2020-2025 History, Science, Travel, Food and Children's lists come from booklisti.com, which copies each article's full list and links back to it. 2024 History was checked against the Smithsonian article itself: booklisti adds an 11th book, Jon Grinspan's Wide Awake, which the article only mentions in its intro, so it is left out. 2017-2019 articles name books only through Amazon widgets. Their titles drop Amazon's subtitles and series tags, and their authors are Open Library's first-listed author for the linked ISBN (co-authors and illustrators dropped). Exceptions: two 2019 Science authors come from the article text (both linked to Kindle editions), and three Photography books whose heading names no author use a retailer listing (Sneaker Freaker: Simon Wood) or Open Library (I'm So Happy You Are Here: Pauline Vermare; Life Dances On: Robert Frank). booklisti titles and authors are kept, with corporate credits (Atlas Obscura, Britannica) and degree suffixes dropped and three all-caps entries fixed against Open Library. Not included: 2014-2016, where the Wayback Machine has only scattered lists; the Smithsonian scholars' favorite-books roundups, which are staff picks; and one-off gift guides.

Organization: Smithsonian magazine. Official site (opens in a new tab)