Four Upsides and One Downside of the Penguin Archive Series

You already know that I’m a big fan of Penguin Classics. I appreciate the writers they chose and the nice book covers arranged with real photos or art objects. However, I recently discovered something even more fascinating: their new Penguin Archive series! Such a lovely play on words—new archived books, so I’m excited to get to my small home library some of those precious things. It’s devoted to their 90th anniversary, so there are 90 books, with a special note about the year when a writer became a Penguin.

In this short blog post, I’ll show you pros and cons of this series, so maybe you’ll also choose a nice book or two for your joy, or vice versa, decide to skip it.

To start with, let’s discuss the wins:

1. Breathtaking selection of works of great writers (such a cliche, “great writer,” but it’s hard to find a proper adjective to describe Homer or Friedrich Nietzsche). And when I say ‘breathtaking,’ I mean exactly this emotional state: they’re offering us not only classic and well-known works (‘The Wrath of Achilles’ by Homer, ‘Hell’ by Dante, or ‘For Art and for Life’ by Vincent Van Gogh), but something unique, not so well-known. For example, I didn’t expect to see ‘A Short Guide to Towns Without a Past’ by Albert Camus, ‘Night Flight’ by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, ‘The History of England by a Partial, Prejudiced and Ignorant Historian’ by Jane Austen, or ‘Can Socialists be Happy?’ by George Orwell. To make my post shorter and not list all those books, I’ll give you a link to the whole collection.

2. Affordable pricing. From 1935, Penguin Publishing House decided that a good book should cost no more than a packet of cigarettes. I have no idea how much cigarettes cost now, but you can purchase one of these collectibles for £5.99. As I see it, it’s a perfect choice if you’re living in an area without vintage bookstores or book flea markets.

3. Compact size. It’s a breeze to carry around one of them. They fit even in the small bag and weigh less than my first aid kit. So, if you’re travelling and looking for a book for a flight, or ride without committing to a long read 一 it’s a great choice, you’ll definitely finish it. And yes, I’m aware of e-books, but we’re standing for comforting things there.

4. Aesthetic design. The books in the series look truly minimalistic and elegantly bound, and the pages have a readable font size. The white color of the covers looks beautiful in most kinds of interiors, if you ask me.

Let’s discuss the only drawback of the series that I have identified so far. If you like to press book pages with a brass clip or thumb bookmark or keep it open almost horizontally, I think there is a small chance of damaging the binding.

As for me, the highlights are enough, and now I’m willing to get about 10 more books from this collection. Compared to 90, I think it’s quite a realistic goal.