Mark Twain defined a classic as a book that people praise and do not read. Penguin Books proved him wrong by pioneering, in the 1930s, the production of inexpensive paperback books that brought literature to the general reader.
Penguin’s imprints proved popular and changed the face of British publishing. They were supplemented in 1961 by the launch of Penguin Modern Classics. Walk into a bookshop today, and you are likely to be confronted by a display of 50 short works of fiction drawn from the publisher’s catalogue and reissued to mark the 50th anniversary of that series. It is a venture worth appreciating, imbibing — and arguing with.
The idea for the Modern Classics came from an enterprising Penguin editor who believed that the quality of modern works entitled them to be regarded as classics. The series has been distinguished from the outset by the quality of the writings and the attractiveness of the designs and typeface. The authors include Orwell, Camus, Woolf, Bellow, McCullers and many others whose works enrich the life of the mind. The books are frequently a treat for the eye as well as the imagination.
The critical reader inevitably quibbles. It is odd, for example, that Penguin no longer publishes Hemingway, but includes the work of the dreary ideologue Ayn Rand in Penguin Modern Classics.
The series has nonetheless encouraged, as much as any cultural phenomenon has done, the cultivation of reading in the postwar era. And some truly great books (for example, Edmund Gosse’s childhood memoir Father and Son) would be little known but for their appearance in this series. Such an inheritance ought to be examined and debated, but above all celebrated.