Confessions of a Penguin Snob

My earliest experiences reading classic literature are bound up in Penguin Classics. Indeed, even thinking of the word "book" conjures up a gently-used, iconic black paperback with the trademark Penguin logo on it.  When I first caught onto the fact that the literature we were being fed piece-meal in high school existed in a pure, unadulterated form, I scoured the local used bookstores for copies of The Odyssey, The Canterbury Tales, and Pride and Prejudice.  The shelves were lined with copy after copy of these classic works, all donated (I imagine) from college students who had bought them for English and Humanities classes and then dumped them for a quick buck.  I remember pouring over dozens of copies of Chaucer's masterpiece, trying to fathom why so many would end up in the same place.  I was also surprised that one publisher seemed to corner the market on classics: again and again, the word "Penguin" kept cropping up on the cracked spines.  Thus began my collection of Penguin Classics, leading me on a haphazard journey through English, French, and Russian literature, opening doors to authors and cultures I scarcely knew existed.  

I quickly became a Penguin snob, reading only books that were published under the Penguin Classics imprint, which made my reading a bit insular, but brought me up to speed on hundreds of years of novels, poetry, drama, and non-fiction.  Before I knew it, I was speeding through an English degree at the local university, which was influenced, no doubt, by my professors' choice of Penguin Classics for their courses (though a few threw in Oxford UP for good measure).  What started out as a hobby became a way of life, and ten years later, a vocation: I defended my Ph.D. in June of 2006, and set off a month later to begin my first academic job, boxes and boxes of Penguin books in tow. Today, I teach about 4-5 literature courses a year, each one bolstered with several titles from Penguin's lineup.  In fact, almost every month finds me reading some Penguin or other (though I do read other books--occasionally), so I figured, why not attempt to read every Penguin Classics in existence?  At this point, after 20+ years of reading them, I must be halfway through the list, though the list hasn't exactly been stagnant: new works enter the fold each year, and many authors previously ignored--H.G. Wells, for example--are now prominently arrayed in the iconic black volumes.  So this post will mark my attempt to write about every single book in the catalog, leaning heavily on my own field initially (British literature post 20th century, as well as World Literature of the Renaissance-Enlightenment) before expanding as randomly as I once pulled volumes off the shelves of used bookstores.  I hope this inspires readers to buy more Penguins, read books or authors you either never knew about or had always planned to read, and to consider the importance of translation in a world which, despite thousands of languages and cultures, can seem bound to a single one.  

First up, the very first Penguin ever published, E.V. Rieu's prose translation of Homer's The Odyssey, which coincidentally was one of the first Penguin's I ever purchased.  More on that next time...