The Thammasat University Library has newly acquired a study of one of the most useful publishers of essential international books. The Penguin Classics Book should be of particular interest to students of literature and translation. It is shelved in the General Stacks section of the Pridi Banomyong Library, Tha Prachan campus.

Penguin Classics is an imprint of Penguin Books. It reprints classic works of literature in English as well as in Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and Korean, other languages. The TU Library owns several books in the Penguin Classics series. According to the company website, the series began in 1945 with a new translation of The Odyssey by Homer, a classic poem of ancient Greece that sold over one million copies.

By now, around 3,000 titles have been issued on the list. Of these, over 1,300 titles are still available. One out of every 64 books sold in the United Kingdom today is a Penguin Classic. There are other outstanding series of classic books from other publishers, such as the Oxford World Classics series. But the Penguin Classics series is the only one named after penguins. According to Penguin Classics, in 1935, the English publisher Allen Lane had decided that he wanted to name his new branch after an animal, and use the image of that animal on his books.

The point was to offer inexpensive paperbacks of high literary quality to general readers. According to the story, Lane’s secretary suggested that Penguin sounded dignified, but flippant. Penguin books were soon issued, but not until 11 years later was the classics collection started.

In 2005, a partial collection of books in the series was sold on Amazon.com, although it was sold as The Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection. At that time, the collection contained 1,082 different books and cost just under 8000 USD or 254,688.00 Thai baht. It is not clear if anyone purchased this item, as they would have needed 77 feet of shelf space to put them all.

Over the years, many students and ajarns have found the Penguin Classics to be a helpful and relatively economical way of getting to know important texts. In the Charnvit Kasetsiri Room of the Pridi Banomyong Library, Ajarn Charnvit Kasetsiri and the late Professor Benedict Anderson generously donated a number of Penguin Classics titles from their own personal collections.

These include, from Ajarn Charnvit, such books as Buddhist Scriptures selected and translated by Edward Conze; The Histories of Tacitus: a new translation by Kenneth Wellesley; and The Histories of Herodotus: newly translated and with an introduction by Aubrey de Selincourt.

From Professor Anderson’s collection, and donated by Professor Anderson and Ajarn Charnvit, are The Miracle of the Rose by Jean Genet; Molesworth, a school satire by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle; Noli me tangere = Touch me not by Jose Rizal: translated, with an introduction and notes by Harold Augenbraum; Principles of Political Economy: with some of their applications to social philosophy, Books IV and V by John Stuart Mill ; edited with an introduction by Donald Winch; Rights of Man by Thomas Paine; and The Symposium by Plato: translated by Walter Hamilton. These volumes include some of the most influential books on religion, philosophy, political theory, and related subjects.

Devoted readers

Some readers are so enthused about Penguin Classics that they formed a Penguin Collectors Society. Its website describes it as

an educational charity with the objects of encouraging and promoting the study of Penguin Books and of conserving historical material in institutions available to researchers… Actually collecting Penguin Books is not, of course, a prerequisite for membership. We define ‘collecting’ in terms of preservation and conservation and to us a ‘Penguin Collector’ is someone who recognises and encourages others to recognise the essential importance of Penguin books. However modest the intended life span of an early Penguin book, we feel that these publications revolutionised the publishing industry and it is, therefore, important that they (especially early editions) are no longer simply thrown away. We wish to challenge the perceptions – held even by Allen Lane and the creators of Penguin – that their books were essentially ephemeral.

The society approves of Penguin books making great literature and other essential texts available to the widest readership possibly, comparable the spread of knowledge to the work of BBC educational radio and the Open University, two British institutions. The society lists the beginning of the Penguin Classic series from 1945 to 1969. The first 10 of the 200 titles include:

• L1 – Homer – The Odyssey – E V Rieu – 1945
• L2 – Maupassant – Boule de Suif and Other Stories – H N P Sloman – 1946
• L3 – Sophocles – The Theban Plays – E F Watling – 1947
• L4 – Voltaire – Candide – John Butt – 1947
• L5 – Tacitus – On Britain and Germany (later reissued as: The Agricola and the Germania) – H Mattingly – 1948
• L6 – Dante – The Divine Comedy I: Hell – Dorothy L Sayers – 1949
• L7 – Xenophon – The Persian Expedition – Rex Warner -1949
• L8 – Virgil – The Pastoral Poems (The Ecologues) – E V Rieu – 1949
• L9 – Turgenev – On the Eve – Gilbert Gardiner – 1950
• L10 – Cervantes – Don Quixote – J M Cohen – 1950

The TU Library owns most of these titles, in different editions.

Defending the series

In 1969, Betty Radice, the director of the Penguin Classics series, responded to a review of the Penguin Classics series by a dozen ajarns that appeared in Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the classics, then based at the University of Texas. She expressed disappointment at the opportunities missed, the uneven quality of the individual reviews, the errors and omissions, even the occasional cheap taunt[.]

Mrs. Radice explained the difficulty of finding the suitable translator for the appropriate project:

For all the remaining major poets we are always on the lookout for the right translator, and indeed, some years ago we were happy to commission a poet to translate a poet. Four years later he saw no prospect of finishing and we had sorrowfully to cancel his agreement and are back where we started. The Muse cannot be held to a contract; Arion should know the problems. How many creative poets are there who will submit to the drudgery of translating the stretches of a classical poet which don’t particularly inspire him?… Revision there must always be, withdrawal and reissue where necessary, and we are currently engaged in a major overhaul of the prose translations, starting with the historians. Many of these on reprinting will have new critical introductions by experts, bibliographies, and more adequate notes. Some unsatisfactory issues which were allowed to go out of print (Arrian’s Life of Alexander, for instance) are being extensively revised or rewritten. This, of course, confirms what Arion’s critics have noted, that the Penguin Classics are more bound up with the interests of the teaching world than they used to be.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)