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At this STL bookstore, at least when it was open for foot traffic pre-pandemic, two shelves at the back of the store specifically housed Penguin Classics paperbacks. I, for one certainly didn’t mind, as I would pretty much always head there first to see what was on offer, to use up whatever modest store credit acquired from trading in books. If nothing came up there, then I’d browse elsewhere.
One can ask “why Penguin Classics”, of course. I’d purchased scattered Penguin Classics volumes over the years, ever since seeing a few on remainder at old chain bookstores, e.g. B. Dalton (visual example to follow), or Walden Books, at scattered malls over the years. I’m not quite sure how or when I initially caught on to the Penguin Classics brand, besides understanding implicitly from its brand name that the series covered “classic” literary titles that multiple paperback imprints covered, like Signet Classics or Bantam Classics. Perhaps it was a residual sense from school years that such “classic” books are the books that one “should” read to become a reasonably intelligent person, or something to that effect. Or more subliminally in terms of marketing, the Penguin Classics visual brand was certainly recognizable (examples to follow below).
Whatever those reasons, in the big picture, what gave me the final push for this edition of Bookchat on the theme of Penguin Classics was this December 2020 article from the British literary on-line magazine The Critic, where Alexander Larman wrote of the 75th anniversary of Penguin Classics and featured Henry Eliot, the creative editor of Penguin Classics since 2016. From one passage, Larman asks Eliot the obvious question of the meaning of a “Penguin Classic”, to which Eliot gives the very smart answer that can apply to almost any piece of great literature:
“For me, a ‘classic’ is a book that combines literary quality, historical significance and an enduring reputation, and — above all — it is a book that still feels alive. When you read it there needs to be a flicker of revelation that speaks to you across the years.”
More specifically about the general Penguin brand, which it is part of Eliot’s job, after all, to sell:
“Perhaps that’s the Penguin factor: Penguin was founded to put beautiful, affordable books into the hands of more people, and Penguin Classics aims to continue that tradition. The series is not a catalogue of relics; it’s a list of living texts, a gathering of insights into the human condition from around the world and across time. The series is now the largest library of world literature on the planet.”
There is perhaps a bit of ambiguity, at least to the information that I’ve gathered, on the exact provenance of the Penguin Classics line. The first editor of Penguin Classics was E.V. Rieu, who served in the job from 1944 to 1964. The first Penguin Classics volume was Rieu’s translation of Homer’s The Odyssey, whose publication date is generally given as 1946, although I have seen 1945 mentioned elsewhere. This older webpage from the Penguin website gives a crisp summary of how it went with E.V. Rieu’s translation of The Odyssey, with 1946 as the year of publication:
“Before 1946 … 'Classics' are mainly the domain of academics and students; readable editions for everyone else are almost unheard of. This all changes when a little-known classicist, E. V. Rieu, presents Penguin founder Allen Lane with the translation of Homer's Odyssey that he has been working on in his spare time.
1946 … Penguin Classics debuts with The Odyssey, which promptly sells three million copies. Suddenly, classics are no longer for the privileged few.”
For convenience, 1946 is certainly good enough to state as the starting year, and thus jibes with 2021 as the 75th anniversary year. Eliot also notes the original remit of the Penguin Classics series:
“The Penguin Classics series began in 1946 as a translation-only series — English-language fiction, poetry and plays were incorporated only gradually.”
I don’t have any of the really old Penguin Classics volumes in my collection, like an early edition of that E.V. Rieu translation of The Odyssey or anything like that, although I vaguely recall what looks like much older-looking Penguin volumes (not necessarily Penguin Classics), with plain text covers, on those shelves at Dunaway Books. The oldest Penguin Classics volumes in my collection are volumes like those in the second image in the gallery (feel free to note the order placement and to surmise its logic), if you’re so inclined. Notable aspects of that generation of Penguin Classics covers include:
* The distinctive fonts for the authors and title
* The trademark black frame (on many)
* Cover pictures either of relics from antiquity, or reproductions of old paintings
From what I can tell, these physical copies date from the late 1970s and the 1980s. There is a distinctive change to the style of the volumes in a later generation (not sure if this is exactly the “next generation”), as you can see from the volumes in the 3rd gallery image below.
The obvious visual difference is the shift away from the black ground, with the lighter-colored border, a perhaps “warmer” visual look. The actual font has changed too, although the TITLES and AUTHORS remain in ALL-CAPITALS, as you see. A further evolution of the Penguin Classics visual brand is evident with the book in the 4th image. The shift is evident in a slightly less “harsh” font style for both the title and author, with at least the title no longer in all-capitals.
The above images represent but a very tiny fraction of the Penguin Classics catalog(ue), which number 2976 volumes from the UK version of the Penguin Classics page. Even just speaking for myself, I’ve gone through a bunch of earlier Penguin Classics volumes that I’ve since traded in or left at other LFL’s. With help from going through the 2976 volumes on the list (yes, 3CM needs to get a life — but I speed-scanned the titles, which were 30 per page, so it didn’t take as long as one might think), the following list compiles past Penguin Classics volumes that I’ve read, apart from the selections in the photos that I’ve read (subtext: I’ve not read quite all the ones in the pictures):
The Bhagavad-Gita
The Epic of Gilgamesh
The Nibelungenlied
Peter Abelard: The Letters of Heloise and Abelard
Ludovico Ariosto: Orlando Furioso (Part 1)
Beaumarchais: The Barber of Seville / The Marriage of Figaro
Boccaccio: The Decameron
Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy
James Boswell: A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides
Georg Büchner: Complete Plays, Lenz and Other Writings
Cao Quexin: The Story of the Stone (a.k.a. The Dream of the Red Chamber; all 5 volumes)
Anton Chekhov: ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ and Other Stories
Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone
Dante: The Divine Comedy
Honoré de Balzac: History of the Thirteen
Erasmus: In Praise of Folly
Theodor Fontane: Effi Briest
George Grossmith: The Diary of a Nobody
Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan
David Hume: A Treatise of Human Nature
Henry James:
a. What Maisie Knew
b. The Golden Bowl
Jerome K. Jerome: Three Men in a Boat
Henry Mayhew: London Labour and the London Poor
Nietzsche:
a. Beyond Good and Evil
b. Ecce Homo
c. Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ
Ovid: Metamorphoses
Fernando Pessoa: The Book of Disquiet
Abbe Prévost: Manon Lescaut
Pushkin: Eugene Onegin (the Babette Deutsch translation, different from the Charles Johnston translation in Gallery Image #2)
François Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Confessions
Edmund Spenser: The Faerie Queene
Laurence Sterne: Tristram Shandy
Suetonius: The Twelve Caesars
Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War
Turgenev:
a. Oblomov
b. Sketches from a Hunter’s Album
c. Fathers and Sons
Of course, just because I’ve read all of these books over the years does not necessarily mean that 3CM actually understood everything about them :) . One point also about these books is that I did not necessarily choose these from the bookstore with them in mind. Especially with going to used bookstores like Dunaway Books or other stores back east, I selected from whatever was on the shelf at the time something that I had not read before, using up the store credit for the day. If and when Dunaway Books opens its doors to foot traffic again, the first shelf that I’ll check out should be pretty obvious (even if they might not want to take in used books now, even more so than usual).
So what’s everyone reading now, Penguin Classics or otherwise? Or if you have any favorites among the Penguin Classics line, do post about them. Also, please also feel free to post in the comments if you are willing and able to write a Bookchat diary in the future, although the Readers & Book Lovers admins are more in the know than self the loser about schedule openings and are better equipped to address the issue. Otherwise, the e-floor is now yours...
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