Paperback Publishers Still Feathering Classic Nests

As one who is paid to read vast quantities of contemporary prose published in the so-called “quality” paperback format, I sometimes despair over the apparent fate of Western civilization, or at least of American letters.

Among the titles in the most recent shipment of review copies, for instance, are “Son of Golden Turkey Awards” (“100% New Material”), “In Search of the One-Minute Gynecologist,” “The Jewish Mothers’ Hall of Fame,” and other even more cynical efforts at exploiting the latest imagined enthusiasms of those of us who still buy and read books.

Classical Renaissance

So I take considerable solace in the fact that the publishers have not wholly neglected the books that have earned the right to be called classics--the work of authors who were sublimely innocent of best-seller lists and television talk shows, but whose writing has endured over decades and even centuries.

As long as I can still walk into a bookstore and buy newly published copies of the work of Aristotle or St. Augustine, Donne or Dostoevski, Faulkner or Freud, then there is hope for literacy, democracy and civilization.

Indeed, the repackaging and republishing of the classics is enjoying a little renaissance among the publishing houses. It apparently is not enough to simply typeset, print and bind these books of proven worth and significance; the publishers cannot resist the temptation to dress them up in stylish new covers and issue them in matched sets. Thus, for example, the simple black spine of the Penguin Classic series--which is itself something of a classic in book design--is now embellished with a system of color-coding that allows the reader to distinguish at once among British and American literature, European literature, Greek and Latin literature and Oriental literature.

Other innovations are more intriguing: The Quality Paperback Book Club, for example, is issuing three titles by James Joyce, including the newly redacted text of “Ulysses” that corrects innumerable errors of the Parisian typesetters who rendered the original edition even more obscure than the author intended. But all of these recent efforts represent an entirely healthy and praiseworthy impulse toward the conservation of our intellectual heritage and the preservation of its foundational works of literature.

500-Plus Penguin Titles

By far the most important resource is the Penguin Classics series, a publishing institution that has kept a whole library of world literature in print over the last 40 years. I count more than 500 titles in the most recent catalogue, a list of extraordinary scope and diversity that starts with the “Letters” of Abelard and Heloise and ends with Zola’s “Therese Racquin.” But the Penguin Classics list goes far beyond the facile approach of a “Great Books” series and reaches some fairly exotic and obscure and--significantly--non-Western works. And so we find not only Aristotle and Aristophanes, Cicero and Suetonius, Austen and Balzac and Chekhov and Dickens in abundance, but also Goethe’s “Elective Affinities” and Juan Mascaro’s translation of “The Bhagavad Gita” and all four volumes of “The Story of the Stone” by Cao Xuequin. And each title in the series is instantly recognizable by its compact size, its classical typography and graphic design, and its black spine; indeed, carrying a Penguin Classic has become a kind of badge of literacy.

Now Penguin is refurbishing the series, but with a mercifully light touch and its customary refinement and good taste. Starting with 28 titles--including some formerly published in the Penguin English Library and Penguin American Library series--the Penguin Classics will be given what the publisher calls “a new look,” including handsome cover art and the rather dubious color-coding bar on the familiar black spine. The refinements are so understated as to be mostly invisible, although I discerned newly minted introductory essays in some of the titles now being published in the new format. And the 28 titles that inaugurate the new series demonstrate the eclectic taste and intellectual curiosity that have always characterized the Penguin Classics.

Among the new or newly reissued titles are deeply familiar classics such as John Cleland’s “Fanny Hill,” edited and introduced by Peter Wagner ($2.95); Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” edited and introduced by Maurice Hindle ($1.95) and “The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and Other Writings,” introduced by Kenneth Silverman ($3.50), but also such less celebrated works as Joseph Conrad’s “Under Western Eyes,” edited and introduced by Boris Ford ($3.95); Henry Mayhew’s “London Labour and the London Poor,” selected and introduced by Victor Neuberg ($6.95) and Oriental classics including Lucien Stryk’s translation of “On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho” ($3.95) and “The Songs of the South: An Ancient Chinese Anthology of Poems by Qu Yuan and Other Poets,” translated and introduced by David Hawkes ($5.95).

“Masters and Their Masterpieces,” a less ambitious but nonetheless appealing series, is offered by the Quality Paperback Book Club, both to its members and as a membership premium for new enrollees. Each matched set includes a biography of the author and three titles by the authors themselves; the series includes works by and about Leo Tolstoy, James Joyce and Isak Dinesen. As with other Quality Paperback titles, the books are published in a hard-cover-size format with acid-free paper and sturdy bindings.

‘Masters’ Series Titles

The titles now available in the “Masters” series include Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace,” “Anna Karenina” and “Resurrection,” accompanied by Henri Troyat’s distinguished 1965 biography, “Tolstoy,” translated from the French by Nancy Amphoux, and Isak Dinesen’s “Out of Africa,” “Winter Tales” and “Seven Gothic Tales” plus Judith Thurman’s 1983 biography, “Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller.” The next set in the series will feature a new edition of “Ulysses” by James Joyce, which incorporates the latest scholarship on the authentic text, as well as “Dubliners” and “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” and Richard Ellman’s biography, “James Joyce.” Future editions will be devoted to the lives and works of Thomas Hardy and Edith Wharton.

Each set in the Quality Paperback Book Club series is available to members at $8.95 per volume, or $32.95 for the set of four titles; non-members can purchase an entire set for $7.50 as an enrollment premium. Inquiries about membership and purchase of the “Masters and Their Masterpieces” series may be directed to Quality Paperback Book Club, Camp Hill, Pa. 17011.

And then there is the Modern Library, once a glorious repository of both recent and enduring classics in compact hard-cover editions, which still exists but lacks both the ambition and the accomplishment that the series once claimed. The dust jacket of my cherished copy of the Modern Library edition of “Catcher in the Rye”--a gift from my father when I was but 13--lists nearly 400 titles; today, the Modern Library consists of about 130 titles that are relegated to the back pages of the Vintage Books catalogue. Indeed, the publisher of the Modern Library, Random House, seems to regard the line as a dirty little secret, and it took repeated and somewhat anguished inquiries just to induce the Random House publicity department to send me a catalogue. (Kassie Evashevski, I thank you! You accomplished by overnight mail what your fellow publicists failed or refused to do for three months.)

Still, even in its decline, the Modern Library is a superb source of low-cost hard-cover editions of worthy books, from “The Complete Novels of Jane Austen” ($11.95) and Jorge Luis Borges’ “Labyrinths and Other Writings,” edited by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby ($8.95), to Voltaire’s “Candide,” translated by Haskell M. Block ($7.95); an illustrated edition of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” with woodcuts by Valenti Angelo ($6.95), and “The Plays of Oscar Wilde,” introduced by Edgar Saltus ($6.95). While the Modern Library lacks the cross-cultural scope of the Penguin Classics--the titles are confined to Western and, in fact, mostly English-language authors--the list includes such contemporary works as Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “Cancer Ward,” translated by Nicholas Bethell and David Burg ($10.95); Gore Vidal’s “Julian” ($9.95); and E. L. Doctorow’s “The Book of Daniel” ($8.95). The surviving titles in the Modern Library Series apparently are largely unchanged from their original editions. For example, a recently purchased copy of the Modern Library edition of “The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud,” edited and introduced by A. A. Brill ($12.95), features a snazzy new jacket but text that appears to have been printed from the plates of the original edition that is offered on the dust jacket of my 1951 copy of “Catcher in the Rye.”