A beautiful book which is devoted to Penguin, the publishing house, and the many covers from works they have distributed throughout the years. Penguin is famous for putting out very inexpensive editions (i.e., paperback) of popular and classical works in the English language primarily. Penguin publishes many editions for the same book by the same author. Some variants are shown inside this book for contrast. I happen to have many Penguins in my personal collection. Hard cover editions were rare with Penguin but have become more numerous of late as book collecting became more profitable for all publishers. There are many YouTube channels which have people discussing different publishers and which have advantages and which have disadvantages regarding price points, paper quality, bindings, illustrations, and font type, and line space usage. This book, The Penguin Classics Book, is actually a hardcover cloth edition. Apparently Penguin would print books for library use in hardcover but rarely for other other reasons. I have a History of South America in hardcover but that was printed in the 1960s. The first recent book in hardcover from Putnam, an imprint/subdivision of Penguin, was Morrissey's Autobiography. Almost every country is represented with a writer in Penguin's catalogue. So, from a comparative literature standpoint Penguin is indispensable. The subject of comparative literature is where I am most comfortable besides philosophy. Any reader with an interest in classical books would like this book of illustrations and commentary. I don't want to actually own every book cover pictured inside this book or even read them all but I am interested in seeing what people have read in the past. Penguins are very popular in America for school texts and they become sentimental possessions after classes have finished. I like them because they are very durable and will last for twenty years if treated decently. They usually have excellent scholarly introductions or introductions by famous authors who would be known to the readers. Just because an author has their work published by Penguin doesn't mean that they have all their work published with Penguin also. Except for maybe Bernard Shaw or Charles Dickens every author will have some work published by another publishing house. Penguins are an option for readers but not an exclusive option. ( )

Browsed, as this is more a reference book to dip into than to read continuously, this is a joy for a reader of Penguin Classics since the 1980’s. Wonderful to see familiar old covers, read the brief descriptions and more interestingly the stories about the translation and publication of the books. Bookish social history!
Penguin have a lovely introduction at https://www.penguinclassicsbook.co.uk/ ( )

I first engaged with the Penguin Classics imprint in the second half of my teens when I started reading Thomas Hardy, as a result of an English lesson that used a passage from The Woodlanders, describing fallen leaves - thanks, Mr. Bray! (He was one of those teachers who was better the more enthusiasm or talent you displayed - no good for the recalcitrant or below average.) Anyway, I was delighted one day when I saw a flimsy paperback that turned out to be a catalogue for the series, including the Modern Classics, too - being handed out for free! Of course I took one and used it for reading inspiration. I still have it, decades later!

Now, the imprint has a new print catalogue - a large format hardback of over 400p, with the Modern Classics to get their own separate volume - costing £30. The lsit has expanded an enormous amount since the '80s! Is it worth it? After all, a constantly updated listing is available online for free.

Well, for me the answer is a resounding, yes! This isn't simply a list of books in print. As well as short descriptions of each book, there are micro-biographies of the authors and sidebars about the history of Penguin Classics and biographies and anecdotes about editors and translators who have worked on the series. There's even a page explaining ISBNs and their origins. Did you know that the first three digits of a bar code are a geographical origin code? Since books are fundamentally international, they have their own code, known as "bookland" - which is why ISBN13s all start "978" or "979." I love that books have their own country!

The Penguin Classics remit is gigantic; the classics of world literature up to and including WWI - thousands of years. The book therefore stands as a guide to the world of books that are still considered important/great/interesting/entertaining after at least 100 years. It shows up some of the impacts of world history just by charting how much (or little) material came from where and when. The list has not been sniffy about genre, at least as far back as the '80s, by the way. It has changed constantly (not just growing) - books have gone out of print, been replaced with new translations, expanded, split up into multiple volumes, conflated into fewer volumes, so I expect this volume was out of date by the time it went on sale, but that in no way detracts from its value to me as a ready reference and source of inspiration. ( )