Two Penguin mentions in one week? Maria and Tricia, you both are BATTY.
Clockwise from top: The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus, Of the Abuse of Words by John Locke, A Confession by Leo Tolstoy, On Friendship by Michel de Montaigne, The Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln, Where I Lived and What I Lived For by Henry Thoreau, On Natural Selection by Charles Darwin, Days of Reading by Marcel Proust
Last week, I was at The Book Cellar, passing time before a friendly dinner/ukulele and banjo lessons, and I noticed a glorious rack of Penguin Classics. The Penguin Classics Great Ideas series features ageless works that have inspired minds and provoked change. Although the collection includes ideas of questionable integrity (…The Communist Manifesto is not exactly exemplary…), the series heralds ideas of great influence.
There are currently four series of Great Ideas. Each series is composed of twenty works, and has a striking color scheme. My favorite aspect of Great Ideas is the brilliant typography and cover designs (that angled square in the cover to Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus is THE BOULDER THAT SISYPHUS HAS TO PUSH UP THE MOUNTAIN – !!!). This might be a superficial declaration, but book covers this beautiful make even the most frighteningly heavy books exciting to read.
PS: HAPPY WEEKEND!
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5 Responses for "Penguin Great Ideas Series"
Ho, I just bought this one : http://www.penguin.co.uk/static/covers/all/8/1/9780141036618H.jpg from the serie 3. I basically bought it for the cover (design & Orwell, I’m there), but the book in itself is really interesting too.
I didn’t even know it was such a huge collection, thanks Tricia !!
Ho by the way, penguin is doing something awesome called “my penguin” : you can have you own design for the cover of any book you chose (from a selection of like 20 classics, Alice in Wonderland, Dracula, the Great Gatsby, Animal Farm…). It’s 5£ for each book, which is almost like it’s free, and you get to have your own personalized book !
Here’s the link : http://www.penguin.co.uk/static/cs/uk/0/minisites/mypenguin/index.html
I’m going to work on the Alice in Wonderland cover while it’s out of stock…
OH MY GOD, I have been coveting these! Not that I live in NY anymore, but they were always at Penn Station and Port Authority book stores (remarkably good bookstores — sort of distilled down to the good stuff). I swear, if in HS they had given me one of these books instead of some shitty copy in some old textbook, I would have enjoyed them more.
Also, on amazon.com you can get them in box sets: Great Ideas Box Set #1 Except that is not all of them… I wish you could get ALL of them at once.
AHA I knew you would want these, Maria.
Penn Station and the Port Authority book stores had them? That’s ridiculous. I don’t even think I’ve seen them at a Borders in Chicago, but maybe they’re hiding, and not as well displayed as they are at the Book Cellar.
At my experimental high school, I didn’t read much of what’s featured in the Great Ideas series. Maybe selections of the Communist Manifesto and Lao Tzu in history classes? If someone had shown me one of these books, however, I probably would have been enthusiastic to read it.
Ookah, I’m a little jealous that YOU can design a Penguin Classic, and I can’t. The US Penguin site is always behind the UK Penguin site (at least, that’s what I gather from coveting the penguin classics series designed by coralie bickford-smith, and having to wait until it was released in the US). Side note: Although I think this is a great idea, I shared this with my friend and he said, “I can’t decide if that’s cool or LAZY.” Ahahaha.
You’ll have to share your design for Alice in Wonderland!
I *love* the cover to The Gettysburg Address – saw that on a design site a while ago and couldn’t stop drooling. I’m a sucker for anything involving typography ;)
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