Find

While wandering around town with M yesterday evening, came across a copy of Seven Hundred Penguins on sale for $9 (marked down from $49.95)! As I have been salivating over all the wonderful covers in this book since I first saw it, I of course could not resist the low, low price!

It’s a retrospective, a look at the covers of Penguin paperbacks “from Penguin’s birth in 1935 to the end of the twentieth century”.

From the introduction, by Jim Stoddart:

Paperbacks like these are intrinsically vulnerable – they cannot, and will not, last forever. Despite being relatively common (in some cases millions have been printed, in others only a few thousand), these books yellow and crumble as each year passes and so their numbers diminish. Yet looking again recently at an old copy of James Joyce’s Dubliners (it’s now somewhere in among these pages), it’s incredible how well these paperbacks can survive. The paper, yellowing even the first time I read it, is even browner now, and the dog-eared cover somehow affirms the fragility of being, and yet the whole thing is intact. For a paperback to survive twenty or thirty years is a decent achievement. For paperbacks to survive fifty, sixty or seventy years, as many shown in this book have, well, that practically makes them worthy of antique status, and still they can be had, from a second-hand bookshop, for the price of a packet of cigarettes.

I was going to list some of the amusing titles in the book but it seems a bit cruel to do that, and not actually show you the covers.

More: another view of Penguin.