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Self-help books are books written with the stated intention to instruct any readers on a number of personal problems. They take their name from Self-Help, the Victorian best-seller, but are also known and classified under "self-improvement", a term that is a modernized version of self-help. They moved from a niche position to being a postmodern cultural phenomenon in the late twentieth century - a period marked out by 'the burgeoning literature of self-improvement...that expanded dramatically in the last quarter of the twentieth century, particularly in its final decade'. Informal guides to everyday behaviour might be said to have existed almost as long as writing itself. Certainly ancient Egyptian "Codes" of conduct 'have a curiously modern note: "you trail from street to street, smelling of beer...like a broken rudder, good for nothing....you have been found performing acrobatics on a wall!"'. Indeed, 'some social observers have suggested that the Bible is really the first and most significant and most helpful of self-help books.
