Hi there, my name is Henry Elliot and I'm the author of the Penguin Classics Book
and this book is designed to be a reader's companion to the best books
ever written in the world. So the aim of this book is to put all those books into
your two hands between two covers and tell you a little bit about every one and
every one of the authors as well. And it takes you through from the very
beginning of literature with the epic of Gilgamesh in Mesopotamia, all the way
through to the poetry of the First World War.
So it's a kind of history of world literature through each of the Penguin
Classics titles. It's also beautifully designed and illustrated with
photography of the first Penguin editions of each of these titles so you
get a real sense of this list growing over time and being built by a whole
raft of different editors, translators, series editors, designers and so on. It's
an absolute treasure chest, like a kind of chocolate box of books which you just
want to dive into and gorge on. Or at least that's what I hope you'll want to do. And I've
brought along a few things to show you from the Penguin archive. So this is
where it all began, this is the very first Penguin Classic. It's The Odyssey
by Homer translated by E. V. Rieu. Now, E. V. Rieu
was a semi-retired academic publisher who spent much of the Second World War
sitting on top of a roof on Birkbeck College in London watching out for fires
during the Blitz. And during these strange, unreal, cold, chilly nights he
would pass the time by translating the Odyssey. He said that he
went back to the Odyssey in these unreal times because Homer was the
supreme realist in his eyes. And after he'd translated this book he pitched it
to Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin Books and said would you like this new
translation of the Odyssey? And frankly it wasn't a very promising pitch because
between the two wars between the First World War and the Second World War there
had been eight new editions of the Odyssey including three new translations
and none of them had sold that well. I think three had sold over three thousand
copies, which was kind of middling fare at the time but
Allen Lane saw that this was something different. He commissioned the
translation, not only that he commissioned E. V. Rieu to be the new
series editor of a new translation series. The Odyssey was different because
it presented this great work of classical literature as a slim,
accessible paperback. It was put on bookstores alongside crime fiction,
popular fiction and people felt like it was approachable and accessible. And it
was a brilliant bet that Allen Lane made because this book was the best-selling
Penguin book for years, it sold something like three million copies in the end and
the first book that overtook it was Lady Chatterley's Lover after that became so
famous after the trial. So the series got off to a good start and E. V. Rieu, the
first translator, was the kind of founding father, he saw it
through those first years. The series has expanded over the last seven decades and
it's had four different designs. It began with this one which was refined
slightly but remained pretty much the same until 1963. Then the second design
was the first one to introduce what is now a kind of trademark black spine on
Penguin Classics. This is my personal favourite design of the four. It's so
simple. It was introduced by an Italian designer called Germano Facetti and as
you can see it's just got very simple lettering at the top, Penguin Classics and then
the title; if this had an author it would have an author name there. And then it
always had such bold designs. I love this one. The Cloud of Unknowing is a
14th century anonymous religious text but rather than, I don't know, show
an illuminated manuscript or something they've taken this little woodcut of
a cloud, turned it negative, and then put it in this sort of fluorescent pink on a
black background. It's so bold, this edition's from 1965 and you could
probably only have made this book in the 1960s but I love it. Then the next
design came along in 1985 and I've got one of the early mock-ups of how that
design was kind of created. This was the mock-up for Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein which first entered classics in this look and as you
can see this is the sort of tracing paper that the designer used to make the grid.
This design harked back to the first one slightly by having
a cream border and it was a black panel with white writing for the
title and then an image in the middle. It now feels rather sort of rigid and
constrictive I find, but this is the look that I grew up reading as a
teenager and what I studied at school, I didn't seem to mind it at the time. But
since then it's changed one last time in 2003. We have a completely new look now
which is modelled very well here on the shelves behind me. This look has become
the sort of classic look that we associated with Penguin Classics of
recent years. It has a black panel at the bottom, a little white strip with the
series name on it and then the rest of the cover is taken up with a full bleed
image like this. And again it's very classic and this look has spread across
the world. So in the USA, Penguin in America are producing books using this
grid. It's also being produced in South Africa, in China, in Spain, in Brazil. It's
become a truly global brand and long may it continue. But I suppose the
point of this book, this book that I've written, is feeling like there's so many
treasures on this list, it's so huge and there's so much to explore, but it's
actually quite difficult to know where those hidden corners are. And so what I
hope this will be is a kind of map, a sort of map for explorers who want to
set out into that literary terrain and discover new mountains, new secret
corners, new books that they're going to love reading.