There can be few more productive tirades against the state of the nation’s railways than that of Allen Lane in 1934. Upon returning from a meeting with Agatha Christie he found himself stranded on the platform at Exeter without a decent book to read. Frustrated at the paucity of quality literature available to buy at train stations he decided upon a course of action that would change the tenor of British publishing forever. The founding of Penguin Books the following year married high culture to low commerce – a vision of paperback masterpieces disgorging from mass produced vending machines at a price even the proles could afford. The first ‘Penguincubator’ appeared on Charing Cross Road shortly afterwards - although the preferred method of acquiring these handsome volumes soon became handing over sixpence to your local Woolworths.
It is strange in this era of cheap paperback production,
aggressive loss-making discounting and brain-boggling digital overabundance to
conceive of a time when books of any literary merit were almost exclusively
produced as costly hardbacks aimed squarely at the affluent establishment. Yet
Lane and Penguin’s co-founder V.K. Krishna Menon encountered widespread
scepticism that such a proposal as theirs could ever turn a profit – a complacent
attitude that allowed the pair to buy up the rights to many a title at rock
bottom prices. The rest is publishing history.
Despite the legion of contemporary authors whose work has
been broken by having the distinctive Penguin logo stamped on their spines it
is arguably the tradition, begun in 1945, of re-publishing established works of
centuries past that is Lane’s greatest legacy to the book reading British
nation. The iconic black livery of the Penguin Classics, as quintessentially
English as cream tea and cricket, was in fact dreamed up by an Italian graphic
designer in 1961 and, excepting a misguided pale yellow period in the late 80s
and 90s, this sleek design has prevailed to the present day.
It is in this minimalist monochrome jacket that the 80
Little Black Classics produced to coincide with Penguin’s 80th
birthday are smartly attired. Each costs the princely (if predictable) sum of
80 pence and consists of 50 to 60 pocket sized pages. The list runs the gamut
from short stories to poetry to essays to (often unintentionally hilarious)
philosophical maxims to travel writing to biography to mythical sagas and
fables to self-contained episodes from larger, picaresque works such as the
Decameron and the Canterbury Tales. There is even a volume of correspondence
between Mozart and his dad. Alongside the leviathans of the Western canon (Dickens,
Balzac, Dante, Coleridge) sits the work of lesser known figures like Baltasar
Gracian, a seventeenth century Spanish priest whose Machiavellian aphorisms on
exploiting your friends and enemies for power and profit should be required
reading for any aspiring ‘Apprentice’ candidate, and Kenko, who turns out not
just to be a brand of coffee but also a rather uptight Japanese monk. From
Homer to D.H. Lawrence (or, if we bow to the series’ delightfully random
numbering system, from Boccaccio to the anonymous Dhammapada) pretty much all
human life is here in exquisite miniature.
Penguin have form in this respect of course. Twenty years
ago they unleashed a torrent of Penguin 60s on us, but in truth it was a bit of
a muddled and overcooked enterprise – three separate sets of between 30 and 60
titles split into classic, contemporary and children’s. This initiative feels
cleaner, simpler, more Penguin.
Before I go any further I should probably make a confession.
I like to think of myself as fairly well read and I have a passion for writing
which has seen me churn out a novel, some short plays and a number of theatre
and comedy reviews as well as the borderline OCD nonsense on this blog.
But I struggle with the classics. I really do.
Every so often I make a vow to devour an Austen or a Tolstoy
and it always ends the same way: abandoned roughly halfway through at some
supposedly crucial juncture. I’ve left Elizabeth Bennett pithily dithering over
Mr. Darcy and Andrei Bolkonsky at death’s door at the battle of Borodino (or
Austerlitz or one of the other ones). Time and again I’ve picked up one of
those iconic black jacketed Penguin Classics convinced that this will be the one
– that I’ll finally get what all the fuss is about and start ruthlessly boring
my few remaining friends with endless quotes from my new old favourite author.
But, with the exception of Dickens who is just too much fun to ever consider
giving up on, it hasn’t happened. Yet.
In a recent Guardian feature Nicholas Lezard described the
range of Little Black Classics as ‘publishing meets public service’ (a phrase
Allen Lane would surely have approved of) – citing the insanely affordable
price point as a gateway for the great unwashed to experience proper
literature. Whilst this view may be somewhat condescending, in my case at least
I think it is bang on the money. Or rather on the brevity. For although their
affordability means that the entire set would only set you back £64 it is the
fact that each one can be consumed in a single sitting that I find so
appealing. As someone with a proven track record of running away from a
landmark in World literature when the pages flip into treble figures the idea
that I can dip into anyone from Gustave Flaubert to Ovid (or indeed Baltasar
Gracian to Kenko) and not have to commit myself to a walloping great doorstop
of a publication is, frankly, quite liberating.
And paradoxically of course it makes it all the more likely
that I would want to delve more thoroughly into a given author’s corpus of
work. Indeed I am only a quarter of the way through the list and my interest
has already been piqued by the dark satires of Swift and de Quincey as well as
the melancholy verse of Thomas Hardy. I’m not making any promises but I could
certainly see myself investigating a number of the selected writers further.
Which is ultimately the point I suppose. These 80 literary
tasters are the bait that sets tills ringing with sales of Chekhov’s short
stories and the Arabian Nights and the Argonautica - all Penguin Classics editions naturally.
But so what? Whether it encourages classics cowards like me to immerse myself
in Gothic poetry, Scandinavian epics and Eastern philosophy or just makes us
feel good that we’ve finally read some Turgenev, what’s not to love about these
80 beautiful little books?
And as this is ostensibly a list site, here is the complete
series:
1. Boccaccio Mrs Rosie and the Priest
2. Gerard Manley Hopkins As
Kingfishers Catch Fire
3. The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue
4. Thomas de Quincey On Murder
Considered as One of the Fine Arts
5. Friedrich Nietzsche Aphorisms on
Love and Hate
6. John Ruskin Traffic
7. Pu Songling Wailing Ghosts
8. Jonathan Swift A Modest Proposal
9. Three Tang Dynasty Poets
10. Walt Whitman Alone on the Beach at Night
11. Kenko A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees
12. Baltasar Gracian How to Use
Your Enemies
13. John Keats The Eve of St Agnes
14. Thomas Hardy Woman Much Missed
15. Guy de Maupassant Femme Fatale
16. Marco Polo Travels in the Land of Serpents and Pearls
17. Suetonius Caligula
18. Apollonius of Rhodes Jason and
Medea
19. Robert Louis Stevenson Olalla
20. Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx The
Communist Manifesto
21. Petronius Trimalchio’s Feast
22. Johann Peter Hebel How a
Ghastly Story Was Brought to Light by a Common or Garden Butcher’s Dog
23. Hans Christian Andersen The Tinder
Box
24. Rudyard Kipling The Gate of
the Hundred Sorrows
25. Dante Circles of Hell
26. Henry Mayhew Of Street Piemen
27. Hafez The nightingales Are Drunk
28. Geoffrey Chaucer The Wife of Bath
29. Michel de Montaigne How We Weep
and Laugh at the Same Thing
30. Thomas Nashe The Terrors of the Night
31. Edgar Allan Poe The
Tell-Tale Heart
32. Mary Kingsley A Hippo Banquet
33. Jane Austen The Beautifull Cassandra
34. Anton Chekhov Gooseberries
35. Samuel Taylor Coleridge Well, They
Are Gone, and Here Must I Remain
36. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Sketchy,
Doubtful, Incomplete Jottings
37. Charles Dickens The Great
Winglebury Duel
38. Herman Melville The Maldive
Shark
39. Elizabeth Gaskell The Old
Nurse’s Story
40. Nikolai Leskov The Steel Flea
41. Honore de Balzac The
Atheist’s Mass
42. Charlotte Perkins Gilman The Yellow
Wall-Paper
43. CP Cavafy Remember, Body...
44. Fyodor Dostoevsky The Meek One
45. Gustave Flaubert A Simple
Heart
46. Nikolai Gogol The Nose
47. Samuel Pepys The Great Fire of London
48. Edith Wharton The Reckoning
49. Henry James The Figure in the Carpet
50. Wilfred Owen Anthem for Doomed Youth
51. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart My Dearest
Father
52. Plato Socrates’ Defence
53. Christina Rossetti Goblin
Market
54. Sindbad the Sailor
55. Sophocles Antigone
56. Ryūnosuke Akutagawa The Life of
a Stupid Man
57. Leo Tolstoy How Much Land Does a Man Need?
58. Giorgio Vasari Leonardo da Vinci
59. Oscar Wilde Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime
60. Shen Fu The Old Man of the Moon
61. Aesop The Dolphins, the Whales and the Gudgeon
62. Matsuo Bashō Lips Too Chilled
63. Emily Bronte The Night Is Darkening Round Me
64. Joseph Conrad To-morrow
65. Richard Hakluyt The Voyage
of Sir Francis Drake Around the Whole Globe
66. Kate Chopin A Pair of Silk Stockings
67. Charles Darwin It Was Snowing Butterflies
68. Brothers Grimm The Robber Bridegroom
69. Catullus I Hate and I Love
70. Homer Circe and the Cyclops
71. DH Lawrence Il Duro
72. Katherine Mansfield Miss Brill
73. Ovid The Fall of Icarus
74. Sappho Come Close
75. Ivan Turgenev Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands
76. Virgil O Cruel Alexis
77. HG Wells A Slip under the Microscope
78. Herodotus The Madness of Cambyses
79. Speaking of Śiva
80. The Dhammapada
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