About
The name
In 356 BCE, a man set fire to the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, one of the seven wonders of the world, so that his name would cross the centuries. The Ephesians then forbade anyone to speak it; the historian Theopompus recorded it all the same, and the name has come down to us: Herostratus.
This site makes the opposite gesture. Herostratus destroyed the work of others so that his own name would be remembered; Erostrate gathers the works of others so that theirs are remembered. Of his fire, we have kept only the light.
What we do
Erostrate offers a way into the culture of each country through its works: 188 countries, 6,507 books and films, from the first writings to the year 2000, in four languages, French, English, Spanish and Arabic.
Each country has its page: a text to enter by, keys to reading, one work to begin with, then a wider selection. Each work has its entry, which tells what it is about, where it comes from and in which edition to find it; 741 of them, in the public domain, can be read online.
How the works were chosen
The catalogue does not rank works against one another. For each country we looked for ways in: significant works, recognised in their own country, that say something about its language, its history, its way of telling or filming.
We keep one work per author, the most representative, to leave room for as many voices as possible. A missing work has therefore not been judged lesser; other doors exist, which each reader will find on their own. The entries are written from sources that we cross-check, and the limits of the whole are set out below, plainly.
Our aim
To make people want to. That a reader in Lyon opens a Bengali novel, that a viewer in Bogotá discovers a film from Burkina Faso, and that each leaves with one more door open. The world is immense; you can begin it somewhere.
What this catalogue does not say
What time destroyed
The catalogue holds only 382 works from before 1800, out of 6,507. That figure does not measure what was composed, it measures what survived: burned libraries, languages become unreadable, supports that rot in the tropics and books destroyed by conquest sorted them before we did. Four Maya codices survive out of thousands. To read this part of the site is to read a selection made by chance and by violence.
Nothing after 2000
The catalogue stops at the year 2000: no book published and no film released after that date appears in it. More than a quarter of a century is therefore missing, with the writers and filmmakers who have emerged since and the late works of those who were already there.
This limit weighs more heavily on countries whose written literature or cinema developed in recent decades: their page shows a beginning, not the present state.
What orality did not leave behind
A literature that is not written does not enter a catalogue of works. Sub-Saharan Africa, apart from Ethiopia and its written literature, and Oceania appear here mostly from the nineteenth century, when missionaries, administrators or local scholars began to transcribe; the few older works are oral traditions dated by their supposed composition. That is not when those societies began to compose, it is when somebody wrote down what they had been saying for centuries.
The weight of translation
An untranslated work is an invisible work for whoever looks for it. This catalogue was built from French, and it therefore holds best what French publishing chose to translate. That shows in East Asia in the nineteenth century, rich in thousands of titles and represented here by six works, or in African-language literatures, where the part written in English and French is over-represented.
One work per author
The catalogue imposes a rule on itself: one work per author and per country. It makes room for under-represented literatures, but it reduces a novelist of thirty books to a single title and makes secondary works, collections and second novels disappear. The 6,329 authors present here are therefore not comparable: some fit into it entirely, others appear only through a sample.
The imbalance between regions
Europe supplies 2,475 works, Oceania 166, for 188 countries in all. Part of that gap comes from demography and from the history of print, part from the catalogue itself: the thematic lists cover only 114 countries out of 188, and they were first built around European movements. The site makes this imbalance visible rather than correcting it in silence.
What the catalogue does not count
A work is attached here to a country, which assumes borders that literature ignores. Exiled authors, languages spoken in several states, diasporas and vanished empires fit badly into it. The language of writing is given for every work; for 523 of them, it is not the language of the country. And 129 entries are anonymous, which does not mean without an author, but without an author kept by transmission.
The countries that are missing
The site covers 188 countries, while the United Nations has one hundred and ninety-three member states. Sixteen of them have no page: Andorra, Liechtenstein, Monaco and San Marino in Europe; Qatar; Eswatini in Africa; the Maldives in Asia; Dominica, Saint Kitts and Nevis and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines in the Caribbean; the Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau and Tuvalu in the Pacific. The Vatican, an observer state, has none either. Most of them have fewer than two hundred thousand inhabitants; for Qatar, Eswatini and the Maldives, the works found have no summary that can be established.
Conversely, some pages do not correspond to a state: Scotland and Wales, set apart from England; Palestine, Taiwan and Kosovo; Greenland, French Guiana, Martinique, Guadeloupe, New Caledonia and Puerto Rico. Elsewhere, the attachment follows the state: the writers of Hong Kong appear under China. Derek Walcott appears twice, under Saint Lucia, his native island, and under Trinidad and Tobago, where he founded his theatre.
Few women
Of the 6,218 works in the catalogue whose author is known, 671 are signed by one or more women, roughly one in ten; 14 others are co-signed by a woman and a man. The share is 13% for books and 6% for films. It grows over time: 3% of the books written before 1800, 11% of those from the first half of the twentieth century, a quarter of those published since 1980. For each country the catalogue keeps the work that reference works place first: it therefore inherits their choices. The count is based on the catalogue's biographical notes.
Why say so
A catalogue that hides its biases passes off its gaps as the state of the world. This one prefers to name them, because an informed reader reads better: an empty box becomes a question, and over-representation stops being proof of worth. The texts of the periods and of the country pages follow the same rule, and say why a given area is absent at a given time. It is the only honest way to offer a tour of the world in 6,507 works.