In 1956, after Penguin Classics had published 60 titles, the editor-in-chief of Penguin Books, William Emrys Williams, wondered: ‘How many more titles in the classical literature of the world are there?’ As a case study in heroic shortsightedness, this measures up to Bobby Charlton’s question to his brother Jack after England’s World Cup victory in 1966: ‘What is there to win now?’
Williams needn’t have worried. Penguin has not run out of new classics, and there are currently around 1,200 in print. Like the NHS, Penguin Classics is an institution — a miracle of curation, covering 4,000 years of human thought, albeit with a largely Eurocentric vision — that didn’t exist 75 years ago.
It began in 1946, with E.V. Rieu’s translation of the Odyssey , which cost a shilling and sixpence. ‘This is revolutionary,’ wrote Reynold’s News, and the series policy was to give the classics to the general reader who was put off by ‘the stilted, old-fashioned and otherwise un-English style which has too often been adopted by translators’.
Penguin Classics quickly became such a success that it proved a staple for both the bookshop browser and the academic syllabus, a tricky (‘impossible’, said Betty Radice, the series’ joint editor) balance struck through introductions and annotations on the one hand and smart design on the other. You can tell someone’s age by which Penguin Classics cover style they grew up with. The early look, with coloured edges and white covers illustrated with a roundel bespoke to each title? The design based on a contemporaneous painting, text in a black box, all bordered in tasteful cream? Or the current style, black and austere so that the covers of the books seem, like brown road signs, to indicate not that this will be a pleasure but that it will be good for you?
The Penguin Classics Book brings together the best of that eye for book design with Penguin’s other quintessential characteristic: a ruthlessly self-consuming exploitation of its own intellectual property.
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