#penguin vintage paperbacks

[heyiappreciateyourshoelaces]

And then he got stage fright

just some of the the changes in design for the Penguin Symbol on old Penguin Paperbacks 

[macrolit]

from ml.books

[chuckbbirdsjunk]

[lucydacusgirl]

Penguin cloth bound classics are so highly overrated it makes me mad

[the25centpaperback]

Into Deepest Space by Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle, cover by Peter Tybus (1977)

[60thisyear]

[andrewburke]

[theconformist]

Current read: Vintage Penguin book

The Big Heat - William P McGivern

[nohoperadio]

A small number of classics publishing thoughts

I wish it were way more common to see long books published in multiple volumes. I'm fine with long books existing but a 900 page paperback is not good to hold in your hands. It's bad to hold. It's heavy for example. I don't wanna do that. If there were two of them but smaller it would be fine.

And I get why this doesn't happen in general, if you need to buy two books that's going to be more expensive, customers en masse wouldn't like it. But I'm puzzled about classics publishing specifically, because this is where choice, in theory, abounds. If I want a copy of War and Peace, I can cheap out on a £3.99 Wordsworth edition that probably uses a public domain translation and will definitely fall apart before I finish it, I can pay £9 more for the privilege of real paper and footnotes from Penguin/Oxford/Vintage/etc, I can pay £9 more than that for a tacky Penguin Clothbound edition because a straight person on instagram told me to, and above that there's varying degrees of actually nice expensive gift editions, I mean the Folio Society has proven that there's really no upper-bound to what people will pay for a book that looks really good.

What I can't seem to do, for any amount of money, is buy a paperback that is the size of my hands. I literally can't do it. All of the above are single volume and between 1000-1500 pages. The Everyman's Library War and Peace is in three volumes but hardback, and hardback is a significant disadvantage imo but that's probably genuinely the best option still. And that's a special exception anyway, Everyman's doesn't make a habit of doing this, their edition of Middlemarch for example is one 900-page volume, same with the other longboys I checked.

Surely there is room in this variegated competitive market for one edition that prioritizes comfort, for people who want to actually read the book and have a nice time doing so. It seems like there's not. Oh well.

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I made fun of the Penguin Clothbound series above, and listen if you think they look cool and not like something conceived by a graphic design student who's just looked up what books are as research for their assignment then more power to you, but you still shouldn't buy them because they suck, like the quality is so bad! That coloured ink rubs off so easily it's insane. Part of my job involves picking books from the shop floor for online orders, and I hate seeing orders for the those ones because it's a very frequent occurrence that we'll have like six copies of the clothbound Frankenstein or whatever in-store and I still can't fulfill the order because none of them are remotely presentable, they've all got prominent scratches or faded parts, and this is before they've ever even been owned by anyone, this is just from existing in a shop and getting occasionally manhandled! It's so so sad. And the thing is a lot of books age gracefully, they look nice and well-loved as they get battered and worn, but these ones when the ink comes off just look like cheap pieces of shit! Please stop buying them, you do not want these books on your shelves trust me!

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tbh the normal-ass Penguin Classic black paperbacks aren't always great quality either. My copy of Wuthering Heights looks like it's been passed down through three generations but I bought it new and I've only read it 1.5 times:

And like sure I let it get jostled around in my bag a lot but I do that with all my books and they don't all look like this. Definitely part of the issue is that it crinkles white which shows up really strongly against the black, but even allowing for that it's really bad. Penguin just kind of sucks with their classics publishing in general I think. It's weird because you'd think with no living author to pay royalties to there'd be more room for investing in an actual quality product--seems not! Most of my others in this series are kinda beat up too although admittedly this is the worst example.

(I don't even like Wuthering Heights it's kinda boring! The 0.5th read was my first attempt, I fell off it and then forced myself to try again later. I probably wouldn't still own it if it weren't sadly too ugly now to give away!)

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Classics publishing! Just some thoughts.

[michaelmoonsbookshop]

Vintage Penguin books in our bookshop

[macrolit]

from ml.books

[chuckbbirdsjunk]

[vtgbooks]

Vintage HARPER LEE To Kill A Mockingbird Paperback 1973 1970s Penguin Book

[supersoakerfullofblood]

My Favorite Cover Designs

I just posted about how I love cheap paperback book printings that aren't first and foremost concerned with aesthetic value, and that the recent drive of "books as aesthetic decoration" is wack,

BUT

that doesn't mean you can't love a good lookin book! The aesthetics of a book's cover should be admired, even if that isn't the book's main purpose. So here's a thread of my favorite book covers:

This cover series of Evelyn Waugh's work by Back Bay Books. (Not all books pictured.) Haven't read too much Waugh, but these covers are beautiful and get at the hearts of Waugh's stories: satirizing the high-class culture of England.

Pengunin Random House's Vintage Classics Collection. They don't all have this cover motif, but a lot of them do, and it's charming. A good chunk of them have the plant/flower design motif, but not all of them do, and I love them all regardless. The colored triangles on the side is an attractive way to show that it's a cover series, and the covers (at least the ones I've run into) are matte, which I love!

Penguin Random House's The Master and Margarita

Just the best book cover I've ever seen. And one of the best books I've ever read.

Not a huge Gaiman fan personally (his stuff is great, just not for me), but damn do these books from William Morrow Paperbacks hit.

Not a big Chabon fan either--just not for me--but this series gives his books an undeniable character. Couldn't find the publisher to credit.

Mariner Books's series of Virginia Woolf's most popular novels has been my favorite cover series for a long time. It really feels like Woolf's prose in a way I can't put into words because I don't know artistic lingo, but it's there.

Dell Publishing's series of I believe all of Kurt Vonnegut's work gets at the witty, comic nature of Vonnegut's novels and are instantly recognizable by color.

[elenajohansenreads]

So my brother-in-law's birthday present to me is, apparently, a six-month subscription to Bookishly, which I was unaware of before because it's a UK-based company. Also because I don't really pay attention to the various subscription/box/crate services out there until a) they sponsor a YouTuber I watch (like tippsy, which sadly doesn't ship to my state because laws about alcohol shipping are labyrinthine); or b) someone I know buys me one (like Bokksu, which I greatly enjoyed for the three months I got it, a few years back.)

I'm receiving the "Tea and Vintage Book" package. He knows me so well!

It came with a bookmark as well, which is fab, because I'm always in need of more as they get lost or wear out.

The book came wrapped in quite lovely paper printed with a Virginia Woolf quote about secondhand books, very appropriate.

The book itself, Swan Song by John Galsworthy, I had never heard of, and appears to be the first Penguin paperback edition, published in 1967.

It's #6 in a nine-book saga. Fortunately for me, modern technology will supply the first five--they're all available digitally from my library, though I'll be getting a mix of audio- and ebooks to catch up to the paperback. Once my borrow limit rolls over tomorrow I can get started!

[andrewburke]