There are over 150 Books of Lists produced by business journals, and hundreds more industry lists and rankings produced by other publishers across the United States. From New York to LA, from Florida to Charlotte, this site is your portal to finding more ranked lists than any other resource in the world.

Book of Lists: Clarification

When you are dealing with the term "Book of Lists," one of the issues you'll encounter is that it's used for several contexts. For my purposes, I am dealing exclusively with the Book of Lists as:
  1.  A compilation of business rankings, in a variety of industrial categories (Top Accounting Firms, Top Architectural Firms, Top Private Companies)
  2. Such a compilation, produced exclusively by a regional business journal (or in rare cases, by an industry trade journal)
  3. Such a compilation, created using primary research (i.e. surveying)
  4. Such a compilation, produced in printed format (usually once, annually) or digital format (usually an online database subscription, Excel download, or CD Rom).
  5. For example: http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/businessList.pl?djoPage=product_details&djoPid=15903&djoPY=%40pWBJIgrfL83s
Now the majority of Books of Lists fit this profile, but there are a few that are totally unrelated and fall outside of this classification. For example:
  1. The Book of Lists, by David Wallechinsky. This book is described in Wikipedia as "one of a series of books compiled by David Wallechinsky, his father best selling author Irving Wallace and sisterAmy Wallace. Each book contains hundreds of lists (many accompanied by textual explanations) on unusual or esoteric topics ..."
  2. And then you have a few cases of Books of Business Lists (such as the following: http://www.entrepreneurpress.com/email/ListsFM.pdf) which provide important lists to keep in mind when running a business; for example, lists of considerations for running a business. Or lists of Entrepreneurial Resources. 
The above two cases are examples of what I am rarely, if ever talking about.