Best book year ?

       At BBC Culture Jane Ciabattari wonders what was: The greatest year for books ever ? -- and suggests it was ... 1925.
       She notes:

The year 1925 was a golden moment in literary history. Ernest Hemingway's first book, In Our Times, Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby were all published that year. As were Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans, John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer, Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy and Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith, among others. In fact, 1925 may well be literature's greatest year.

       Some good stuff, indeed -- but, as you no doubt noticed: all written in English. Which makes it a bit suspect -- you'd figure a truly great literary year would extend beyond English-language writing. (In fact, several foreign works were first published in 1925 that would surely just strengthen her argument: Kafka's The Trial (though, yes, that was written years earlier) and André Gide's The Counterfeiters, among others).
       An amusing exercise, but there are strong cases to be made for a lot of other years -- stronger too than, for example, her case for 1950 (again all English-language works ...). Wikipedia does a decent year in literature-series (click on the year for many of the major publications (and other literary events) of that year (e.g. 1925), and while you should use with caution (and note that it too is a bit English-writing-centric), it's a decent starting point.