A week ago, I was at Eslite in Chung-Yo department store when I saw this two foot long log of 80 little books in a white case occupying an entire shelf in the world literature section. I looked closely and recognized most of the authors but few of the titles. I didn't realize Penguin had chosen selections from classics and re-titled them. I thought it would be a nice addition to my collection but the price 4375-$150, seemed a little steep. Flash ahead to a few days ago when we returned to the store. My wife was there to apply for a 15% discount birthday present. In addition to the monthly first purchase discount of 22%, it brought the price of the set down to $112; a saving of $40. A Nice deal! The books now sit on the counter of antique Taiwanese cabinets perfectly. The first book I started was #1 (see the list below). I can't say I'll read the rest in order; I looked over #9 next.
The Guardian reviewed the 2015 collection of 80 books with selections from the Penguin catalog, one for each year. "No notes, no introductions. The texts stand or fall on their own."
Read Guardian book review here
"Contemplating the books en masse is like being let loose in a sweet shop. Austerely desirable, but also playful in their way: some familiar authors have been given unusual titles – It Was Snowing Butterflies for a selection from Darwin’s Beagle voyage; Mrs Rosie and the Priest for a story from The Decameron – and others are discrete, self-contained, such as De Quincey’s On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, or The Communist Manifesto. I do not know The Dhammapada; now I can get a taste of it. Ditto Pu Songling, Kenkō, Akutagawa and Shen Fu. Buying the lot doesn’t seem like a crazy extravagance."
Little Black Classics – the list in full
1. Boccaccio Mrs Rosie and the Priest
2. Gerard Manley Hopkins As Kingfishers Catch Fire
3. The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue
4. Thomas de Quincey On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts
5. Friedrich Nietzsche Aphorisms on Love and Hate
6. John Ruskin Traffic
7. Pu Songling Wailing Ghosts
8. Jonathan Swift A Modest Proposal
9. Three Tang Dynasty Poets
10. Walt Whitman Alone on the Beach at Night
11. Kenko A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees
12. Baltasar Gracian How to Use Your Enemies
13. John Keats The Eve of St Agnes
14. Thomas Hardy Woman Much Missed
15. Guy de Maupassant Femme Fatale
16. Marco Polo Travels in the Land of Serpents and Pearls
17. Suetonius Caligula
18. Apollonius of Rhodes Jason and Medea
19. Robert Louis Stevenson Olalla
20. Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx The Communist Manifesto
21. Petronius Trimalchio’s Feast
22. Johann Peter Hebel How a Ghastly Story Was Brought to Light by a Common or Garden Butcher’s Dog
23. Hans Christian Andersen The Tinder Box
24. Rudyard Kipling The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows
25. Dante Circles of Hell
26. Henry Mayhew Of Street Piemen
27. Hafez The nightingales Are Drunk
28. Geoffrey Chaucer The Wife of Bath
29. Michel de Montaigne How We Weep and Laugh at the Same Thing
30. Thomas Nashe The Terrors of the Night
31. Edgar Allan Poe The Tell-Tale Heart
32. Mary Kingsley A Hippo Banquet
33. Jane Austen The Beautifull Cassandra
34. Anton Chekhov Gooseberries
35. Samuel Taylor Coleridge Well, They Are Gone, and Here Must I Remain
36. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Sketchy, Doubtful, Incomplete Jottings
37. Charles Dickens The Great Winglebury Duel
38. Herman Melville The Maldive Shark
39. Elizabeth Gaskell The Old Nurse’s Story
40. Nikolai Leskov The Steel Flea
41. Honore de Balzac The Atheist’s Mass
42. Charlotte Perkins Gilman The Yellow Wall-Paper
43. CP Cavafy Remember, Body...
44. Fyodor Dostoevsky The Meek One
45. Gustave Flaubert A Simple Heart
46. Nikolai Gogol The Nose
47. Samuel Pepys The Great Fire of London
48. Edith Wharton The Reckoning
49. Henry James The Figure in the Carpet
50. Wilfred Owen Anthem for Doomed Youth
51. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart My Dearest Father
52. Plato Socrates’ Defence
53. Christina Rossetti Goblin Market
54. Sindbad the Sailor
55. Sophocles Antigone
56. Ryūnosuke Akutagawa The Life of a Stupid Man
57. Leo Tolstoy How Much Land Does a Man Need?
58. Giorgio Vasari Leonardo da Vinci
59. Oscar Wilde Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime
60. Shen Fu The Old Man of the Moon
61. Aesop The Dolphins, the Whales and the Gudgeon
62. Matsuo Bashō Lips Too Chilled
63. Emily Bronte The Night Is Darkening Round Me
64. Joseph Conrad To-morrow
65. Richard Hakluyt The Voyage of Sir Francis Drake Around the Whole Globe
66. Kate Chopin A Pair of Silk Stockings
67. Charles Darwin It Was Snowing Butterflies
68. Brothers Grimm The Robber Bridegroom
69. Catullus I Hate and I Love
70. Homer Circe and the Cyclops
71. DH Lawrence Il Duro
72. Katherine Mansfield Miss Brill
73. Ovid The Fall of Icarus
74. Sappho Come Close
75. Ivan Turgenev Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands
76. Virgil O Cruel Alexis
77. HG Wells A Slip under the Microscope
78. Herodotus The Madness of Cambyses
79. Speaking of Śiva
80. The Dhammapada
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