In celebration of Penguin's 80th Birthday, they have released eighty of their most popular titles into their new range of 'little black classics'. And they are all available at the bargain price of 80p each. Yes, you read that right - you can buy each book for 80p. Penguin was established in 1935 by, Sir Allen Lane and V. K. Krishna Menon, as a way to publish and sell quality books, inexpensively. Since then, the company has gone on to create the subsidiaries, Pelican and Puffin, which feature affordable non-fiction texts, and texts for children. I am a firm believer in that books should be cheap, well made, and easily accessible, which is one of the many reasons why I love Penguin. my childhood memories are full of me reading books and saying to my mum: 'look mummy, its one of those books with a penguin on!' They have had a great and memorable eighty years, heres to next eighty!
They have a great selection in the range, which I will list below, but first I want to show off the ones that I managed to get my hands on Yesterday afternoon.
I have read some of the ones that I bought in the past, and many of the others have been on my wish list for years at 80p each, I could hardly say no to finally buying them!
Waterstone's Uxbridge didn't have many of them in stock, so I only managed to pick up fourteen - but fourteen is better than none, right? The fact that they are numbered is driving me crazy, because I know there is so many more of them to collect and I really want the full collection.
I think I am most happy about buying The Tell Tale Heart. It's a book I always keep coming back to, and it never ceases to bore me! I get something new from it every time I read it.
These books are so great, each one is about 60 pages long, contains a few points about the author on the flyleaf, a contents page, and of course the novel/poetry itself. The fact that they are 80p each, is mind blowing to me, the average paperback book is around £8/9.00 and has maybe 300 pages more than these classics, so surely if penguin can get away with selling these for 80p each, other publishing companies could easily get away with selling their books for a tad cheaper.
You can buy these books wherever books are sold, but you can also buy them from their official website, which has an interactive penguin to help you choose which one to buy. You can find the full list of Little Black Classics below!
Which ones would you love to get your hands on, and why?
Complete list of Little Black Classics
1. Boccaccio, Mrs Rosie and the Priest
2. Gerard Manley Hopkins, As Kingfishers Catch Fire
3. The Saga of Gunnlaug, Serpent-tongue
4. Thomas de Quincey, On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts
5. Friedrich Nietzsche, Aphorisms on Love and Hate
6. John Ruskin, Traffic
7. Pu Songling ,Wailing Ghosts
8. Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal
9. Three Tang, Dynasty Poets
10. Walt Whitman, Alone on the Beach at Night
11. Kenko, A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees
12. Baltasar Gracian, How to Use Your Enemies
13. John Keats, The Eve of St Agnes
14. Thomas Hardy, Woman Much Missed
15. Guy de Maupassant, Femme Fatale
16. Marco Polo, Travels in the Land of Serpents and Pearls
17. Suetonius, Caligula
18. Apollonius, of Rhodes Jason and Medea
19. Robert Louis Stevenson, Olalla
20. Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
21. Petronius, Trimalchio’s Feast
22. Johann Peter Hebel, How a Ghastly Story Was Brought to Light by a Common or Garden Butcher’s Dog
23. Hans Christian Andersen, The Tinder Box
24. Rudyard Kipling ,The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows
25. Dante, Circles of Hell
26. Henry Mayhew, Of Street Piemen
27. Hafez, The nightingales Are Drunk
28. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Wife of Bath
29. Michel de Montaigne, How We Weep and Laugh at the Same Thing
30. Thomas Nashe, The Terrors of the Night
31. Edgar Allan Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart
32. Mary Kingsley, A Hippo Banquet
33. Jane Austen, The Beautifull Cassandra
34. Anton Chekhov, Gooseberries
35. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Well, They Are Gone, and Here Must I Remain
36. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Sketchy, Doubtful, Incomplete Jottings
37. Charles Dickens, The Great Winglebury Duel
38. Herman Melville, The Maldive Shark
39. Elizabeth Gaskell, The Old Nurse’s Story
40. Nikolai Leskov, The Steel Flea
41. Honore de Balzac, The Atheist’s Mass
42. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper
43. CP Cavafy, Remember, Body...
44. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Meek One
45. Gustave Flaubert, A Simple Heart
46. Nikolai Gogol, The Nose
47. Samuel Pepys, The Great Fire of London
48. Edith Wharton, The Reckoning
49. Henry James, The Figure in the Carpet
50. Wilfred Owen, Anthem for Doomed Youth
51. Wolfgang, Amadeus Mozart My Dearest Father
52. Plato Socrates’ Defence
53. Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market
54. Sindbad the Sailor
55. Sophocles, Antigone
56. Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, The Life of a Stupid Man
57. Leo Tolstoy, How Much Land Does a Man Need?
58. Giorgio Vasari, Leonardo da Vinci
59. Oscar Wilde, Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime
60. Shen Fu, The Old Man of the Moon
61. Aesop, The Dolphins, the Whales and the Gudgeon
62. Matsuo Bashō Lips Too Chilled
63. Emily Bronte, The Night Is Darkening Round Me
64. Joseph Conrad, To-morrow
65. Richard Hakluyt, The Voyage of Sir Francis Drake Around the Whole Globe
66. Kate Chopin, A Pair of Silk Stockings
67. Charles Darwin, It Was Snowing Butterflies
68. Brothers Grimm, The Robber Bridegroom
69. Catullus, I Hate and I Love
70. Homer, Circe and the Cyclops
71. DH Lawrence, Il Duro
72. Katherine Mansfield, Miss Brill
73. Ovid, The Fall of Icarus
74. Sappho, Come Close
75. Ivan Turgenev Kasyan, from the Beautiful Lands
76. Virgil O Cruel, Alexis
77. HG Wells, A Slip under the Microscope
78. Herodotus, The Madness of Cambyses
79. Speaking of Śiva
80. The Dhammapada
I can't wait to go out and buy more of these, next time I am in town!
Kirstie xoxo
This is brilliant. I wonder if they will be available everywhere?
ReplyDeleteBeauty Isles | An Island Girl's Beauty and Lifestyle Blog
So far, I have only seem them in Waterstones and on Amazon. I am guessing other places will have them, but I haven't seen them anywhere.
ReplyDeleteThanks, I'll keep a lookout!
ReplyDelete