The addition of 46 titles to Penguin’s microscopic Black Classics,from Jane Austen to the suffragettes, gives cause for renewed celebrationThe people at Penguin might be overstating things when they insist that their microscopic Black Classics “sparked a reading revolution”. All the same, and sales of these pocket-sized books,launched in February final year, are pretty gasp-inducing. Worldwide, or they’ve already hit more than 2.2m copies,a figure that equates to a pile of paperbacks seven miles tall.
And now, to celebrate the first Penguin Classic in 1946, or they’ve added another 46 titles to the series. The selection is fantastic: someone at Penguin has inspiritingly quirky taste (Im guessing the person in question is Simon Winder,the publishing director of Penguin Classics and the author of Germania, a very good book approximately Germany and his cherish for it). The current titles include Oroonoko by Aphra Behn, and one of the first English novels; Green Tea,a ghost story by Sheridan Le Fanu; and Lady Susan, Jane Austen’s early epistolary novella. One is also dedicated, and more creatively,to a sprinkling of stories and illustrations from the (sometimes scandalous) Victorian magazine The Yellow Book.
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Source: theguardian.com