Let's have a look at my penguin classics shall we. Hi everyone welcome back to my channel for
what you can already tell from the thumbnail and title is a guided tour or a look through
of all of my penguin classics and I mean they're very traditional black classics,
the range that they publish most of their sort of pre-20th century literature and I should say
we’ll not mention that autobiography that got published as a penguin classic only a few years
ago because that was odd and generally speaking these are all like I said pre-20th century
titles because penguin do of course have their modern classics range which I actually did a video
all about last year and you all seemed to enjoy that so much that I’ve been meaning to go back
a little bit further and look at my older penguin classics with you. So effectively what I’m going
to be doing in this video is sharing with you all the books I own in these editions and talking a
little bit about them. I think this is a fun way to just look at a general selection of books and
is also fun for those of you who are interested generally in specific editions and different
ranges of books from different publishers. Now I do have a reasonably large additional selection
of penguin black classics but you have seen all of those before because they were a part of my
ancient Greek and Roman literature collection. So I did a whole video last year dedicated to
my classical literature collection which included everything I owned that was um originally written
in ancient Greek or latin including quite a few editions in the penguin black style so I’m not
going to include those all here because I don't want to like re-tread old ground and if you're
specifically interested in classical literature you can go and check that video out but this is
everything I own that is not either Greek or roman but some of which is as old if not older than
those two civilizations. So without further ado let's have a look at my penguin black classics.
Whilst we're the topic of super old civilizations, that is the technical historical definition you
can take that from an ancient historian, I do have some Egyptian literature here. I’m pretty
sure I’ve got two pieces of Egyptian literature but I’ve apparently muddled them up, here it is.
So I have two books here that would be considered Egyptian literature. I have the Egyptian book of
the dead and writings from ancient Egypt. Now I do wish that penguin offered more
ancient Egyptian literature in this range because they're such a good go-to for
any and all sort of ancient literature. Like I, I do really trust them when it comes to say Greek
and roman literature and I have um picked up some other um cultures literature from
their range because you know they're usually reliable in terms of translation maybe they're
not the most up-to-date but if I don't have a specific recommendation my go-to is either
these or the oxford world classics and they have quite interesting introductions as
well. So like I said I have these two pieces of ancient Egyptian writing, although they're not
pieces of ancient Egyptian writing because they're collections. This,
the Egyptian book of the dead is a collection of texts from tombs and coffins and pyramids
and all in one place. I will say this is one of my least favourite laid out penguin black classics.
This is obviously just a facsimile of a much older printing that penguin did and which means that the
typing and the formatting is very old-fashioned and I would not describe as the easiest to read.
That wasn't even the worst page there but the font not, not the best. I kind of wish they'd
reformatted it for more modern edition. They may still yet do that. This one first um was published
in let me tell you yeah in 1923 uh oh actually published first in 1899 with a revised edition
published in 1923 so I don't know where the type settings from but it's certainly not from 2008.
However it's still a really interesting uh volume with some really great sources in there. We then
like I said have writings from ancient Egypt which is a much wider range. We have some
sort of like more folk tales um or traditional stories from ancient Egyptian culture, we also
have some more writings concerning death, a bit like in this volume, some writings on
different pharaohs and it's a really interesting like sort of starter compilation for anyone
interested in ancient Egypt, and like I said has a much more modern type setting so that's good.
So I will say amongst the rest of these books we have two main themes. We have books by one
specific author often collecting together a few of their writings in one place as well as
collections more generally around a specific theme or a specific culture or a specific
nationality with writings by various different authors. So what I mean by that for example
is scottish folk and fairy tales from Burns to Buchan. This is one of my favourite, hi plant,
collections from the penguin black classics range. It's one of my favourite pieces of
Scottish literature. Obviously collects together a lot of different Scottish literature but
I love everything in here and I think it's such a great introduction to sort of traditional Scottish
tales if you're interested in them, that are sourced from various different authors. So
we have authors in here like Burns who are centuries and centuries old as well as some
authors more recently from the early 20th century so it's a very wide range. We have
authors whose names are recognized like George MacDonald or Robert Burns as well as anonymous
stories who we don't know who to attribute them to and it's just a great great compilation.
And I have similar collections like this for some other cultures so for example here
I have Russian magic tales so these are all specifically again sort of fantastical tales
from Pushkin to Platonov so like with Burns to Buchan, we have two Russian authors here Pushkin
and Platonov but also an array of other Russian authors included. And like with Scottish folk and
fairy tales we have both anonymous stories and stories attributed to specific authors in here.
I do love these collections and there are more than I own so I would like to pick them up in the
future because they're a nice place to start with um different countries sort of folk tales. I also
have African myths of origin. So these are all specifically myths and legends to do with like
the origin of the world and humans and different aspects of the universe um but
they're not attributed to anyone specifically. I believe a lot of these have been passed down
orally and then collected together and retold in this collection by Stephen Belcher so this isn't a
collection of different authors per se or at least different authors that you can identify but it is
a collection of different and varied folktales from all across Africa, like all of Africa and
not just one area. We then have three which are in a similar vein from penguin classics I really
really adore and think are really interesting ways to compile stories together which are the Book of
Magic from antiquity to the enlightenment, the penguin Book of Witches, and the penguin Book of
the Undead fifteen hundred years of supernatural encounters. So in these collections we literally
have a bunch of stories collected together on a specific theme from across the world
and that I absolutely adore. So the witch stories in particular go back to around the 16th century I
guess when the witch trials were becoming more popular and more folklore and superstition was
popping up around witches and women who didn't adhere to the norm and you can see a lot of those
like cultural origins through into like the 1600s and the 1700s in Europe and America, and this
one's definitely shorter than the other two but still a great one. We then like I said have the
book of magic from antiquity to the enlightenment, I mean you know when antiquity was and you know
when the enlightenment was this one's pretty self-explanatory, but we have stories from ancient
Greece in here, we have stories from the bible in here, we have stories from the renaissance
in here, a bit of everything. Similar to the penguin book of the undead which are all about
ghosts and hauntings and well the undead spanning all the way again from antiquity to Shakespeare.
I swear I do have some books in these editions which are dedicated to specific authors but before
I get into those I have two more which are not. The first one of which is tales of the marvelous
and news of the strange: a medieval arab fantasy collection. So these again, folk tales, fairy
tales, legends and myths that were originally written in Arabic and collected together in
this volume and translated by Malcolm C Lyons. Then lastly for non-specific author collections
I have Hindu Myths. This one again pretty self-explanatory, the titles are pretty good
as it goes with these collections you know what you're getting this is a collection of um Hindu
Myths. It obviously is not all of Hindu mythology but it is a selection if you are interested in
the topic and don't know much about it. This is a selection of texts that were originally
um recorded in Sanskrit and have been taken from larger works like the uh Mahabharata and Rig Veda.
But as I promised the rest of these books in this video are specific to one author. So the only one
I think is actually non-fiction is the Light of Truth: writings of an anti-lynching crusader
by Ida B Wells. So this is a collection of Ida B wells writing, so um these were not
all originally published together some of them are like articles, some are letters,
all compiled in one place. Some of which are paragraph long some of which are pages and
pages long. So this one you can read all together or you can dip in and out of. And Ida B Wells was
a young black woman and a journalist living in the post bellum US, so after the end of slavery
but actually a lot um earlier than somebody like Rosa Parks and the civil rights movement
that a lot of us are familiar with, and she was campaigning against racism and racial injustice
in the post-bellum America, so yeah an incredible woman an incredible source of history.
And then a little bit earlier we have Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and other christmasy
writings, well other christmas writings, so it doesn't say christmassy but this of course has
the well-known and well-loved novel the christmas carol as well as some other short stories that
Charles Dickens wrote with a christmassy theme. I confess that christmas carol is literally the
only charles dickens I have ever read, yes only Charles dickens I have ever read. I would like
to read more, it’s nothing against Charles dickens he is an author I plan to read more by and I did
like christmas carol but it was years and years and years and years ago that I read it so
it is definitely not a complete education on him as an author but yet that is of course the
one that I own. Then we have very aptly two fairy tale collections and two ghost story collections.
So these two ghosty collections are written by individual authors the first one is Ray Russell’s
haunted castles the complete gothic stories. This is actually one of the more recent books on this
list, it could easily really be in the modern classics range as well I think because it's from
the 20th century and Ray Russell was a horror writer of the 20th century but here we have,
it it's in the black classics. And it actually has a forward by Guillermo del Toro which I think is
super cool because I love del toro as a director and I love his films. We then have an anthology
collecting together Japanese ghost stories um by Lafcadio Hearn, which was first um written
in the very late 19th century. The penultimate book I have to share with you though is franz
xaver von schonwerth’s the turnip princess and other newly discovered fairy tales. So this is a
collection of fairy tales that we didn't have until relatively recently and so despite these
being written in the 19th century they were not first published in english until the 2000s. So
like I said quite a recent addition um to the uh canon of fairy tales for those of us who can only
read english and ancient Greek, um because these were not originally written and either. They were
first written in German I believe, franz xaver von schoenworth was born in amberg bavaria and
lived 1810 to 1886. I adore this collection if you're into fairy tales this is such an
interesting collection to compare to authors like hans christian anderson and the grimm's
brothers because there are similarities but also little differences and I really enjoy that. RThen
last but not least we have the complete fairy tales of George Macdonald. So george macdonald
was a scottish folklorist and, and this is obviously his complete collection of fairy tales,
right here. Similarly these were first written in the 19th century, and are absolutely fantastic.
George macdonald collects together folk tales and fairy tales but he also spins his own yarns and I
absolutely adore his writing, although this is another one that I desperately wish had been
re-type-set for a more modern reader because it is very tiny print in a font it is not the most
legible so yeah if I had anything to say about the penguin classics range is that I wish they
were consistent in re-type setting things. Yes it does cost a little bit extra to re-type-set things
but it makes them far more accessible. Despite that however I’m sure you can tell that I love
this range of books I have quite a few in them particularly pertaining to um legends and myths
and folk tales. They're a great place to go if you're interested in that type of literature and
I expect I will continue to grow this collection as the years pass by. So do let me know if you've
read any of these, if you've picked any of these up or even if you have other books in these
editions that you think I’d be interested in and would like to chat more about them, particularly
fairy tales and folktale collections that I don't have because I’m sure there are more. Plus I’d
love to hear if there are any other specific edition collections you would like to see.
I don't own every single edition out there but I certainly have some others including like the um
vintage red spine classics and some oxford world classics. But I will link down below my classical
literature bookshelf tour and my um penguin modern classics video if you're interested.
Until next time however happy reading and I’ll see you again in the next one bye everyone.