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Penguin Classics

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Penguin Classics
2002 design of Penguin Classics
Parent companyPenguin Books
Country of originUnited Kingdom
Headquarters locationLondon
Publication typesBooks
Official websitewww.penguinclassics.com

Penguin Classics is an imprint published by Penguin Books, a subsidiary of Penguin Random House. They are published in varying editions throughout the world including in Australia, Canada, China, India, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States.[1] Literary critics see books in this series as important members of the Western canon, though many titles are translated or of non-Western origin; indeed, the series for decades from its creation included only translations, until it eventually incorporated the Penguin English Library imprint in 1986. The first Penguin Classic was E. V. Rieu's translation of The Odyssey, published in 1946, and Rieu went on to become general editor of the series. Rieu sought out literary novelists such as Robert Graves and Dorothy Sayers as translators, believing they would avoid "the archaic flavour and the foreign idiom that renders many existing translations repellent to modern taste."[2]

Celebrating their 80th anniversary in 2015, Penguin released 80 Little Black Classics

Design

Penguin Books has paid particular attention to the design of its books since recruiting German typographer Jan Tschichold in 1947. The early minimalist designs were modernised by Italian art director Germano Facetti, who joined Penguin in 1961.[2] The new classics were known as "Black Classics" for their black covers, which also featured artwork appropriate to the topic and period of the work. This design was revised in 1985 to have pale yellow covers with a black spine, colour-coded with a small mark to indicate language and period (red for English, purple for ancient Latin and Greek, yellow for mediaeval and continental European languages, and green for other languages).

In 2002, Penguin announced it was redesigning its entire catalogue. The redesign restored the black cover, adding a white stripe and orange lettering. The text page design was also overhauled to follow a more closely prescribed template, allowing for faster copyediting and typesetting, but reducing the options for individual design variations suggested by a text's structure or historical context (for example, in the choice of text typeface). Prior to 2002, the text page typography of each book in the Classics series had been overseen by a team of in-house designers; this department was drastically reduced in 2003 as part of the production cost reductions. The in-house text design department still exists, albeit much smaller than formerly, and is managed by text designers Claire Mason and Lisa Simmonds, who oversee the majority of the design work. Recent design work includes the Penguin Little Black Classic series.

Bill Amberg

Penguin Classics collaborated with Bill Amberg in 2008 in the design of six books (A Room with a View, Breakfast at Tiffany's, The Big Sleep, The Great Gatsby, Brideshead Revisited, and The Picture of Dorian Gray).[3] These books are bound in leather which was "worked in a way that as the book is handled, the more protected and beautiful it becomes". The books also include their own leather bookmark, which is bound with the book title and author. It has been reported widely that the purpose for this approach by Penguin Classics is to target readers/collectors who would like a "high-end" book, but are not willing to pay over the odds for it.

Series

Within the broader category of Classics, Penguin has issued specialised series with their own designs. These include:

  • Penguin Nature Classics, issued,[when?] with authors such as John James Audubon, Rachel Carson, and John Muir
  • Penguin Modern Classics, issued,[when?] with authors such as Truman Capote, James Joyce, George Orwell, and Antoine de Saint Exupéry. They have silver-and-white designs. Some titles come with critical apparatus.
  • Penguin 20th Century Classics, issued in the 1990s. They were folded into the Modern Classics imprint, presumably in 2000. 20th Century Classics feature full-page front cover art, with a light blue-and-white rear cover.
  • Penguin Enriched Classics, issued,[when?][4] such as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Pride and Prejudice, The Scarlet Letter, and A Tale of Two Cities
  • Penguin Popular Classics, issued in 1994, are cheaper paperback editions of texts under the Classics imprints, typically selling for £2[5] as of 2010. Popular Classics do not come with the critical addenda present in the Black Classics, with the exception of Shakespeare's plays, which have critical addenda written by George Bagshawe Harrison appended.[6] These addenda were originally found in the Penguin Shakespeare editions of the 1930s,[6] which makes them somewhat outdated. Popular Classics issued in the 1990s came with full cover art and a cream back, not unlike the Classics. Most Popular Classics reprinted in the 21st century have a plain, lime green cover with white lettering. They were a response to Wordsworth Classics, a series of very cheap reprints which imitated Penguin in using black as its signature colour.[7]
  • Penguin Designer Classics, issued in 2007, is a set of five limited-edition books, with covers created by fashion designers to commemorate the series' 60th Anniversary
  • Pennguin Little Black Classics, issued,[when?] a series of pocket-sized classics introduced to celebrate the 80th anniversary of Penguin Books.
  • Penguin Pocket Classics, issued in 2016[8]

Complete Collection

Further information: List of Penguin Classics

In 2005, a semi-complete collection of books in the series was sold on Amazon.com as "The Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection".[9] In 2005, the collection consisted of 1,082 different books (in multiple editions) and cost US$7,989.50. The collection weighed about 750 pounds (340 kg) and took about 77 linear feet (23.5 m) of shelf space; laid end-to-end the books would reach about 630 feet (192 m).

In 2008, Penguin Books published a complete annotated listing of all Penguin Classics titles in a single paperback volume in the style of its Penguin Classics books. The list organises the collection multiple times: alphabetically by author, subject categories, authors by region, and a complete alphabetic title index. This compiled listing indicates there are over 1,300 titles, and more to be published.

A feature of the World's Biggest Bookstore in Toronto, Canada, from its inception in the 1970s, and for years thereafter, was that it stocked all of the Penguin Classics titles. The upper section of the second floor of the store was dedicated to Penguin exclusively.

60th Anniversary

In 2007, Penguin Classics released a set of five books limited to 1,000 copies each, known as the Designer Classics.[10][11] Each book was specially designed to celebrate Penguin Classics' Diamond Anniversary:

  • The cover for Crime and Punishment was created by graphic designers Stephen Sorrell and Damon Murray of Fuel,[12] who used Cyrillic and English type. Stephen explains: "This visual device echoes the mind games in the head of Raskolnikov as he battles with his voice of conscience. We want the design to form the shape and feel of the book as a whole not just its cover." They have screen printed the cover on the same brown craft paper used for the text. The book has a Perspex slipcase.
  • The Idiot was designed by industrial designer Ron Arad and has no cover, so the reader will pick it up and read the author's first words. It is stripped back to show the glue and thread in the spine, which is visible through an acrylic slipcase (with a lid) with a fresnel lens, so the text appears to move as the lid is removed. Arad explains: "By not wanting to have a cover, it ended with the book becoming an amazing object that is alive, but which maintains its transparency. It became a glorious box with a book inside—almost like a monument."
  • The cover for Lady Chatterley's Lover was created by fashion designer Paul Smith.
  • The cover for Madame Bovary was designed by fashion designer Manolo Blahnik. The jacket features Blahnik's original painting of Emma with her lover, and the book is protected by a Perspex slipcase. He said: "I wanted to come up with something light, sensual... something frivolous, because this is a novel about the dangers of frivolity. And I wanted something sexy too, cheeky. I usually focus on one part of the foot—the shoe. For this project, I had to consider a whole scene, there had to be a context, which is new for me. But I managed to sneak in a pair of shoes anyway. She wore good shoes."
  • The cover for Tender Is the Night was designed by English filmmaker, photographer, and visual artist Sam Taylor-Wood, who used an ethereal black-and-white photograph printed onto tracing paper. An elegant, barefoot young man stands with his hands in his pocket, perfectly summing up the elegance and fragility of Nicole and Dick Diver's world. The book is wrapped in a cloth hardcover and has a Perspex slipcase.

Controversy

In 2013, Penguin Classics published Morrissey's Autobiography. Concerns arose about the imprint's publishing a book too recently published to be an acknowledged classic, that such a book diluted the brand. Penguin argued that the autobiography was "a classic in the making".[13] London's The Independent said: "The droning narcissism of the [book] may harm [Morrissey's] name a little. It ruins that of his publisher... Morrissey will survive his unearned elevation. I doubt that the reputation of Penguin Classics will."[14]

See also

Notes and references

  1. ^ "Overview". Penguin.com. Retrieved 30 August 2009.
  2. ^ a b Cowley, Des; Williamson, Clare (2007). The World of the Book. Melbourne: Miegunyah Press. p. 81.
  3. ^ Bumpus, Jessica (29 October 2008). "Designer Novels". Vogue. Retrieved 5 June 2014.
  4. ^ "Penguin Enriched eBooks". Penguin.com. Retrieved 30 August 2009.
  5. ^ [1]
  6. ^ a b Hamlet (Penguin Popular Classics). Edited by Dr. G B Harrison.
  7. ^ "Classics on a budget". Times Education Supplement.
  8. ^ Cowdrey, Katherine (February 18, 2016). "PRH launches new classics range, Pocket Penguins". The Bookseller.
  9. ^ Wyatt, Edward (14 November 2005). "One Well-Read Home Has Some New Pets: 1,082 Penguins". The New York Times. New York. Retrieved 30 August 2009.
  10. ^ "Five leading designers explain how they re-covered their favourite Penguins". The Guardian. London. 28 October 2006. Retrieved 12 December 2009.
  11. ^ Rawsthorn, Alice (28 October 2006). "How Penguin Classics books became design icons". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 12 December 2009.
  12. ^ "About". Fuel Design & Publishing.
  13. ^ "Penguin Classics: why are they publishing Morrissey's autobiography?". The Guardian. London. 13 October 2013. Retrieved 17 October 2013.
  14. ^ "Autobiography by Morrissey – Droning narcissism and the whine of self-pity". The Independent. London. 17 October 2013. Retrieved 17 October 2013.
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