When I think of how and when I first read some of my favourite books;
some of my favourite authors, more often than not those initial experiences
came through a Penguin Books edition.
Reading Frankenstein in the custard yellow £1 Popular Classics edition. Reading The Raven and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in 60 pence Penguin mini booklets. The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, bought as a student from a second hand bookshop for £10 of precious food money; the orange spines of the four mouldering volumes bound together in a crisscross of elasticated rubber.
I have an aversion to all kinds of marketing and brand loyalty and yet
Penguin Books have probably had a greater influence on my development as an adult
than any other corporate entity.
I wasn’t much of a reader as a child. I had phases and obsessions like
everyone else, but it never seemed to last very long. I was twenty eight before
I even finished The Lord of the Rings, having read The Hobbit at the age of
eleven, which was to all intents and purposes the first real book I ever read.
An edition borrowed from a neighbouring child, shocked I hadn’t read it. I want
to say it was a Penguin or Puffin edition, but I don’t think it was. I don’t
really remember.
Partly because of the Hobbit, partly because of that childhood friend,
my first real obsession was Choose Your Own Adventure books, especially the
Fighting Fantasy series. During the time that I read them, those books were
published by Puffin, the children’s wing of Penguin. I collected the first two dozen
FF books in the series, as well as the guides and special editions, all of them
displayed in a glass fronted bookcase in the same way that adults display
commemorative plates. I still have my original copy of House of Hell, having still
not completed it after nearly forty years of trying. I was never very good at
computer games either.
Into my late teens and early twenties, I read fewer Penguin editions
than any time before or since. For a time I was obsessed with horror novelists,
reading Pan edition James Herbert novels bought from local market stalls,
before progressing to the superior Clive Barker books bought new. The James
Herbert novels are since consigned to charity shops. The Barker novels,
however, are still an important part of my collection. My Harper Collins
paperbacks are in serious state of disrepair. The opening pages in some cases are
held together by sellotape, I have read and reread them so many times over the
years. Yet they retain a prominent place on my bookshelves.
Having read little as a child, I stared to read more and more as I
progressed into adulthood. Moreover, I began to collect (some might say hoard)
books. Those custard yellow classics become an important and cheap source of
reading material. As well as Frankenstein, I read Edgar Allen Poe, Gulliver’s
Travels and Mrs Dalloway in similar volumes. Penguin published a parallel
series of poetry books in power blue covers. Through those editions I first
read Keats and Blake, as well as the war poets and the romantics.
One December, home from university, I presented my mother with a list of
seven or eight Charles Dickens novels I wanted as Christmas presents, expecting
her to choose two or three from the list. I received the lot, made up of the
custard yellow editions. Not bad for a total outlay of less than I had recently
spent on the collected Orwell. Those books stayed with me for years, until they
were replaced by my great uncle’s centenary edition of Dickens’s complete works,
passed on by relatives who knew I would take care of them.
At university, I developed a true collecting obsession borne out of
sentimentality and gratitude. Penguin Modern Classics book were at the time printed
with mint green covers. In those editions, I first read all of Orwell’s novels,
as well as his trilogy of socialist non-fiction: Down and Out in Paris and
London, The Road to Wigan Pier, and Homage to Catalonia. I bought my first copy
of Ulysses from a second hand bookshop in Cardiff on the way home from lectures
and my first copy of Finnegans Wake brand new from the local Waterstones, both
in those mint green editions. I ate up Ulysses in no time, but it would be more
than a decade before I finished Finnegans Wake (which still makes it an easier
read than House of Hell).
In those same mint covers, I read Kafka’s The Trail, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, and three of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels in one volume. Penguin replaced the mint green editions more than twenty years ago, but I still rescue copies from secondhand bookshops, even if I don’t know the book or the author. As such, I have read Collette’s Collected Stories, the Letters and Journals of Katherine Mansfield, and Tadeusz Borowski’s darkly comic holocaust stories, This Way for the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen, when each might have been missed in favour of books and authors more well known to me. Even now, a collection of DH Lawrence’s short stories in mint green sits on one of my many To Read piles.
The silver editions that replaced the mint green Penguin Modern Classics
seem less romantic, but it is less to do with aesthetics as it is personal
history and the rosy tinted view with which we regard first experiences. Like
first love or the particular incarnation by which we are introduced to a film
franchise, how we experience anything for the first time leaves a indelible imprint
on the imagination. The First Love Fallacy.
The mint green editions hold a special place in my heart and yet it was
in the silver editions that I first read East of Eden, which remains my
favourite Steinbeck novel (and one of my favourite novels of all time). I own
most of Steinbeck’s fiction and non-fiction and the books that aren’t in old
Pan or Grafton editions are all silver Penguins. See also, the second volume of
Philip Marlowe novels. Allen Ginsberg’s Deliberate Prowse. Philip K Dick’s, The
Man in the High Castle.
Over the years, I’ve also picked up older Penguin Classics and Modern
Penguin Classics from secondhand bookshops across the country. Before mint
green, the modern classic novels were grey and white with the only colour
coming from the cubist and modernist cover artwork. These were my introduction
to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the second and third volumes of Sartre’s Road
to Freedom the trilogy (the first part, The Age of Reason, sits among the mint
greens), and Brave New World.
While collecting secondhand books, I began a trend that started out as
an accident but has become something of a superstitious habit. One of my
favourite authors is Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I own copies of most of his novels,
shorter and non-fiction, but I do not own any two books that are published by
the same publisher and in the same edition.
Like the modern classics, the regular Penguin classics have changed over
the years, so that I have a copy of Notes from the Underground and The Double
printed together in a black Penguin Classics edition; a copy of The House of
the Dead in the previous black and yellow covers; and several other books in
earlier editions.
My copies of The Brothers Karamazov and Demons are published by Oxford
University Press, but in subtly different editions. My version of the Idiot is
printed by Wordsworth. I also have various other novels and short story
collections in paperback and hardback from a hodge podge of publishers. It has
become something I take far too seriously. That I cannot obtain a new
Dostoyevsky book unless it is from a publisher or in an edition I don’t already
own. No reason for it. Just because.
In arranging my books, I organise by publisher first, then edition, then
alphabetically from right to left (some weird quirk of being left handed). It
is the Penguin editions that occupy the central bookcase in my library, with classic
and modern classic box sets sitting on top. I have collected so many Penguin
books, there isn’t room for them all on the shelves and they overspill to lie
sideways on top of the other rows.
Other publishers are available. Yet the default for any book available
from multiple publishers will always be Penguin. I once bought a copy of War
and Peace in a Wordsworth edition from a charity shop. However, the text was
far too small and the font and paper quality used by Wordsworth always seem to
cause me problems. The Count of Monte Cristo in a similar edition took months
to get through, forever delaying the reading for something with better quality
print. Which is a pity, because The Count of Monte Cristo is a masterpiece.
As such, I replaced the War and Peace Wordsworth with a two volume
Penguin edition from a secondhand bookshop. Then I was able to read all 1,666
pages in four days over a long weekend. More impressively, I didn’t get through
even a hundred pages on one of those days. More than five hundred pages a day
over the other three. A personal record.
Other than Penguin, I have constructed what I consider an impressive
library over the years. Books bought brand new and from charity and secondhand
bookshops. Some special editions from the likes of Folio Book that cost a lot
at the time but which have only accumulated in value over the years. In a
charity shop in Sunderland in 2000, I bought a copy of Wide Sargasso Sea for
25p. From what I can tell, the book is part of an early print run of the first
edition and worth a couple of hundred pounds.
Such finds are rare and in the Internet Age less likely to be missed by booksellers. But everyone can build a private library for relatively little money, if you know the right places to look. In one place where I lived, there were two places within walking distance that were practically giving books away. Five books for a pound in one charity shop that was only open on certain weekends. I found so many books there I would often throw them money on the way past even when I wasn’t buying anything. There I got a massive French dictionary for 20p. Also, a Penguin classics boxset, including Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, and Robinson Crusoe that was mine for £1. It sits like a monolith on top of the Penguin bookcase.
The other place was even better (or worse). Essentially a junk shop with
boxes of books of which the owner just wanted to get rid. My housemate found it
and dragged me there to pan through boxes, looking for gold. I would take a
backpack with me to fill up with on Pan Agatha Christie books and come away
with change from a £2 coin.
When I used to visit family in Liverpool, I had a walk planned out where
I could visit four or five bookshops in a one hour circuit. One of my nine
copies Moby Dick (the correct number of Moby Dicks one should own) came from
those foraging expeditions. Also, Jason Burke’s excellent history on Al-Qaeda.
One birthday in 2005, I took myself on a trip to Hay-on-Wye. A cold,
dark February. Largely deserted. Spending two days wandering around the town’s
plethora of bookshops. So many options. So many choices to make. Buying the
first Foundation books. Schindler’s Ark. Chandler’s final, unfinished Philip
Marlowe novel, Playback. Seeing books like Brenda Maddox’s biography of Nora
Joyce that I would buy online many years later.
A strange trip. Getting the train to Hereford. Sat reading the
introduction to the Cambridge Press edition of Hamlet in a café, waiting for
one of the handful of buses a day that go to Hay-on-Wye. Filled to the gills on
Full English Breakfasts and my ear talked off by the landlady of the bed and
breakfast where I was staying. Meaning to go back some day. A day yet to come.
How many other books have I bought on similar trips? Da Vinci biography
from Clos Lucé. Chomsky in Florence. A Griel Marcus book on Dylan from
Greenwich Village. Not to mention the many bookshops to be found in Amsterdam.
In Amsterdam’s American Book Exchange, many an American edition can be
found. American and Canadian backpackers bring them with them from across the
Atlantic and swap them out for newer books from the same shop. A treasure trove
of secondhand books, replete with basement repository of science fiction and
horror novels. One of my favourite places to idle away an afternoon, racked
with indecision and guilt for those I leave behind.
Of course, the Mecca of European bookshops is the Parisian Shakespeare
and Company, opposite Notre Dame cathedral. Not the original Shakespeare and
Company, but baring the same name as Sylvia Beech’s shop that stood on the rue
de l’Odéon until it was closed in 1941 following the Nazi invasion of France.
From that original location, Ulysses was first published, Beech
financing its printing and publication. Not only a bookshop, but a lending
library, Beech’s Shakespeare and Company was a familiar haunt for many writer’s
of the so-called Lost Generation. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, all
borrowed books from Beech with varying levels
of diligence about returning them on time. Hemingway was apparently one of the
worst.
The original location is now a boutique, but George Whitman opened the
current Shakespeare and Company in 1951 and continued to run it until his death
in 2011. Part of the ritual of a transaction is to receive a Shakespeare and
Company stamp on the flyleaf of the book you have bought. I have a few such
books, but my copy of Campbell and Robinson’s A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake takes
pride of place.
As well as physical bookshops, there are many places that sell books
online. Although Abe Books is unfortunately owned by Amazon billionaire, Jeff
Bezos, it is undoubtedly a valuable source for finding rare books that are
otherwise out of print. As a reader and amateur scholar of James Joyce, I have
found many reference books via Abe Books that I couldn’t have found anywhere
else. I own three glossaries of the Gaelic, German, and Scandinavian words in
Finnegan Wake, each of which are former library books and which had over the
decades been borrowed a total of eight times between them before being
withdrawn and put up for sale. I have also been able to find cheap, well
preserved copies of most of the standard academic texts on Finnegans Wake from
the same site.
My father was a great reader, though our tastes are somewhat divergent.
He had a large collection of books on the kings and queens of England and was an
avid collector of books on Horatio Nelson. Still, I did inherit from him my
first copies of the collected Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde, as well as two
copies of the collected Sherlock Holmes stories.
Many of his books were given to his local model building society after
he died, but a few remained. Among these was a handful of Time Life Seafarers
books that had stood on the bookshelves since the late 70s. Large black
hardbacks, filled with glossy pictures. I often flipped through those books as
a kid, enjoying the books on pirates and Vikings the most, like any boy with a
vivid imagination. At some point I set out to actually read those books. Being
more than forty years old, the veracity of the text has slipped somewhat, if it
was ever very accurate to begin with.
Still, they are enjoyable for what they are and I wondered how many more
there were in the series other than the ten we owned. A little research revealed
a total of twenty two volumes. With the help of Abe Books, I set out to
complete the set. Most were bought for a few pence plus postage and packaging
from places like Tallahassee Public Library. All in remarkably good condition.
Books that I will probably never read again, but like collecting mint green
Penguin Modern Classic editions, the endeavour was done for entirely sentimental
reasons. If nothing else, they serve as ballast at the bottom of one of my myriad
bookcases.
I dislike brand loyalty and yet more of the books on my shelves are
Penguin than of any other publisher. I drink out of a Bonjour Trieste cup. I
have a cupboard full of similar Penguin Books mugs. I have boxes of postcards
displaying Penguin covers that are affixed to the exposed sides of my
bookcases.
Penguin were the first company in the UK to print cheap paperback
editions of the classics and make them accessible to mainstream audiences. In
1960 they dared the wrath of the UK censors by publishing Lady Chatterley’s
Lover and went to court to defend the public’s right to read it.
British and international readers owe Penguin an enormous debt of gratitude, not only for printing all kinds of paperback novels, but for filling the secondhand bookshops of the world with books that are in constant state of recycling. For hoarders like me, who are not rich and yet want to read and display the books twe have read, Penguin are an invaluable resource. As such, anyone can build a private library on a budget, should they so desire.
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