Penguin Classics

All you want to know about Penguin Classics

2002 design of Penguin Classics

Penguin Classics is a series of books published by British publisher Penguin Books. Books in this series are seen by literary critics as important members of the Western canon, though many titles are translated or of non-western origin. 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 Dorothy Sayers and Robert Graves as translators, believing they would avoid "the archaic flavour and the foreign idiom that renders many existing translations repellent to modern taste".[1]

Design

Penguin Books have 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 later revised to have pale yellow covers with a black spine, color-coded with a small mark to indicate language and period (red for English, purple for ancient Latin and Greek, yellow for medieval and continental European, 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 closed in 2003 as part of the production costs rationalisation of the Classics list, and any design work is now done by editors and outside suppliers.

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

Complete Collection

In 2005, a semi-complete collection of books in the series was sold on Amazon.com as "The Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection".[3] 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).

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, for the sake of the prestige. The upper section of the second floor of the store was dedicated to Penguin exclusively.

Most prolific authors

Books in the collection by title

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