TITLE: Number Theory Reading List
QUESTION [9 upvotes]: What are the essential number theory texts that every serious student of number theory should read?

REPLY [2 votes]: I think that if you get another twenty answers, they will all mention Hardy & Wright. Your library might have it but you'll probably have to put in some kind of storage retrieval request.
I'm not sure if Old John's referring to this book:

Ian Stewart & David Tall, Algebraic Number Theory and Fermat's Last
Theorem, 3rd Ed. Natick, Massachusetts: A. K. Peters (2002)

That's a very good one. I also recommend:

Ethan D. Bolker, Elementary Number Theory: An Algebraic Approach. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications (1969, reprinted 2007) (Beware the long list of errata, though).
H. Davenport, The Higher Arithmetic, 7th ed. 1999, Cambridge University Press
Benjamin Fine & Gerhard Rosenberger, Number Theory: An Introduction via the Distribution of Primes, Boston: Birkhäuser, 2007
Ivan Niven and Herbert S. Zuckerman, An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers, New York: John Wiley (1980)

It might also be a good idea to look at books devoted to the Fibonacci numbers.
As for books to avoid: books that look like they were typeset on a typewriter or on Microsoft WordPad and books that make strange claims about how knowing number theory is directly correlated to capital investment success.