FEATURE
Septagepenguinarian
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It's been a good year for penguins. Luc Jacquet's documentary March of the Penguins brought out the heart — and, according to some, the latent christianity — of the flightless birds. But the publisher Penguin's 70th anniversary brought out the creatures' brains. Since its hatching in 1935, Penguin has focused on publishing affordable literature, turning, according to its in-house hagiography of founder Allen Lane, "a nation of book-borrowers [into] a nation of book-buyers." Apart from Penguin's seduction of thrifty readers, the company has understood the power of a series — book-buyers, more so than borrowers, are suckers for collections, sets, and completion. To fête its anniversary, the UK division of Penguin has released 70 sliver-thin paperbacks selected from its formidable back bench of talent. The authors range from Park Slope wunderkind Jonathan Safran Foer to Bloomsbury doyenne Virginia Woolf. As expected, the catalog reads like a periodic table of well-known, well-trod-out authors: Kafka, Homer, Camus, Dahl, Levi, Flaubert, Nabokov, Waugh. But the selections — though previously published excerpts and short stories — are exceptional. Waugh's The Coronation of Haile Selassie sketches the frenetic streets of 1930's Addis Abbaba, while Flaubert's informal The Desert and the Dancing Girls alternates letters to the author's mother with accounts of tranny lap dances and hand jobs. Less sodomistically, though no less appetizing, the series includes George Orwell
George Orwell's Defense of English Cooking, Alistair Cooke's Letters from Four Seasons, and chef du jour Jamie Oliver's Something for the Weekend.
Though not adhering to the original Penguin color scheme — orange for fiction, blue for biography, green for crime — the series' spines ripple smoothly from dark blue to burnt umber in seventy gradations of hue. And though one, obviously, shouldn't judge a book by its cover, these volumes are well served by the 70 contemporary designers — splashing a couple tonguing onto Will Self's Design Faults in the Volvo 760 Turbo and retro typeface and confetti onto Zadie Smith's short story collection, Martha and Hanwell. The only real disappointment, due to the complexity of New World-Old World copyrights, is that the set is available only in the UK. Still, at £1.50 (or $2.58) per book, a bit of cross-pond consumption isn't going to sink your wallet.
While a 70th birthday could be slightly depressing, Penguin is still all that a paperback — and youth — should be: supple, sexy, and something you want to take home.
- Joshua David Stein
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