I agree that many of the answers were simply un-detailed lists of a half-dozen books, but it is not the fault of the question nor the question-poser that the answers given were not in line with the rules.
True, but the questions weren't locked because of their answers, they were locked because they - the questions themselves - are not good content for a Stack Exchange site. (That's a general rule, by the way. Whenever a question is locked or closed, it's not because of any answers it may have received.) As dmckee said in a comment:
Yes, these things could be valuable in and of themselves, but they break sites. No, really, they do. The easy-to-ask, easy-to-participate-in cruft drives out the real content that makes the site different from the rest of the internet. They ruin the one thing that makes Stack Exchange sites different and better.
Keep in mind that Stack Exchange sites are not trying to be your one-stop resource to find all useful information on a particular subject. We are trying to be the best place to ask specific questions and get accurate answers. Accordingly, we don't want to deal with anything that's not a specific question or an accurate answer. I'm not saying all that other content is useless; on the contrary, some of it is very useful. But it's not what we're trying to collect here. There are plenty of other places online where that other content can find a good home.
Open-ended lists fall into that category of non-SE content. So no, we will not unlock those questions. They're useful, sure, but this site is not the place for them.