Tag Archives: penguins on parade
Penguins on Parade: Not Yet!
We can pause roughly mid-way in our Penguin Alphabet to daydream about all those great books out there that for one reason or another (critical unpreparedness, zealously guarded copyright, etc.) have never quite made it into the Classics canon – but very much deserve to. The full list of such Not Yet Penguins would be [...]
Penguins on Parade: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu!
Some Penguin Classics – in fact many of them – leave you badly wanting more. The world, the writers they show us seem to breathe the living air, and the little wedges of exposure we get between Penguin covers tingle the mental skin, make a taste, create an itinerary to the nearest library to [...]
Penguins on Parade: Livy!
Some Penguin Classics, as we’ve seen, are overshadowed by their own brethren. Authors pour their hearts into the things they write, but no matter how their own estimations fall, the reading public has a much louder say – and it’s almost never how the author would like things to go. Human nature being what it [...]
Penguins on Parade: Juvenal!
Some Penguin Classics are doubly significant – not only is the ‘source material’ something that’s often been venerated for centuries, but the particular edition chosen by Penguin has also achieved something of the status of a classic. Such is certainly the case with the renowned edition of Juvenal’s satires produced by the great classicist Peter [...]
Penguins on Parade: The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.!
Some Penguin Classics just automatically prompt a smile – because some classics are just happy occurrences, free of somber overtones, free of the burden of interpretation, free of the obligation to be anything other than entertaining (which hasn’t stopped academics and English departments from beavering away at them, but even so). And one of those [...]
Penguins on Parade: The Odyssey!
Some Penguin Classics are just a bit more famous than others, and the top spot there will likely always go to E. V. Rieu’s 1946 translation of Homer’s Odyssey, because it got the whole show started. And it started in the way all the best intellectual endeavors do: on amateur footing, without a thought of [...]
Penguins on Parade: Wives and Daughters!
Some Penguin Classics make their courtroom cases with the blunt force of a bulldog trial lawyer, flatly asserting that their client deserves a better deal. Of course this is what all reprint editions should do, ideally: no book should assume a second life in print – books cost money to make and time to read, after [...]
Penguins on Parade: Sentimental Education!
Some Penguin Classics live forever in the shadow of their more famous brethren, which is of course unfair. My lit’rary friends and I have often lamented the way so many authors are best known for their second-best work, and predicting when and how it’ll happen seems to boil down to divining the urgencies [...]
Penguins on Parade: Buccaneers of America!
Some Penguin Classics you’ll never the hell have heard of, period. Top of that list would be something like Alexander Exquemelin’s De Americaensche Zee-Rovers, published in a lovely little edition in Holland in 1678, and yet there it is, all dolled up in a 1969 Penguin Classic translation by Alexis Brown. Exquemelin’s book translated into [...]
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