The Penguin Classics Book, Henry Eliot (Penguin 2018)
“Twenty-five whores in the room next door,” sang the great Andrew Eldritch. “Twenty-five whores – and I need more.” I’m like that about books. In fact, I hope Andrew Eldritch is like that about books too. A goth icon who doesn’t love books isn’t much of a goth icon. I’m not a goth myself, but I’m goth-adjacent. My bibliophilia is one of the things that make me so.
Strangely enough, my BFF is more of a bibliophobe. She doesn’t like the way one corner of her house has begun to fill with books of mine. She cries “No!” when more appear, so I have to smuggle them in now. But I was caught when I brought this celebration of Penguin Classics round. “This isn’t just a book,” I confessed. “It’s a big book. And it isn’t just a big book: it’s a big book about books.”
“No!” she cried. She tells me I have enough books. I tell her that you can never have enough books. And this big book about books is full of more books that I’d like to own. It’s also got a lot of books I already own or have once owned. I recognize covers from decades ago. Or I wish that the editions I own now had the covers shown here. Penguin have used some beautiful art and photography on their books. Some bad or drab art, too. You can see both on various Penguin editions of Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, for example. The cover from 1948 has a broad blue stripe at the top and a broad blue stripe at the bottom, with the title and author’s name on the broad white stripe in the middle. The cover from 1989 is good, though: it’s a full-color reproduction of a Victorian oil-painting of General Gordon facing death from the spears of the Mahdi’s army.
In this case, I recognized both covers because I own both editions. When I like a book, I like to read it in different editions and different languages. And Eminent Victorians is one of my favoritest books. This is what Henry Eliot says about it here:
Eminent Victorians 1918
Strachey pioneered a new form of biography that combined psychological insight with irreverence and wit, debunking Victorian myths of stiff upper lips and derring-do. In Eminent Victorians, he presents biographies of four legendary personages of the previous century: the self-serving Cardinal Manning, the unbearable Florence Nightingale, the didactic Thomas Arnold (272), and the imperialist General Gordon of Khartoum. The philosopher Bertrand Russell read the book in Brixton Prison and called it ‘brilliant, delicious, exquisitely civilised. […] I often laughed out loud in my cell while I was reading the book. The warder came to my cell to remind me that prison was a place of punishment.’
The underlining of “Thomas Arnold” means that one or more of his books are discussed here too, on page 272 in this case. I’m not interested in Thomas Arnold, but maybe I should be. There is a downside to owning lots of books: you can get lazy in your reading, choosing what you enjoy most or find easiest to absorb, giving up too soon on a book that seems difficult or unrewarding. Sometimes it’s good to have less choice or no choice at all. Or to choose at random. There are hundreds of Penguin books I’d like to own, but it would be better for me and my mind if I had to read one book at random for every one or two or three that I read because they appealed to me.
And what does appeal to me here? The foreign literature. Penguin have published texts from all over the world and all periods of history. The Penguin Classics series began with a best-selling edition of The Odyssey and has gone to include everything from Gilgamesh to Henrik Ibsen. French and other European literature looms largest, but behind them you can see the towering ranges of of Asian literature, especially the texts from the great civilizations of India and China:
THE UPANIṢADS 8th-5th centuries BCE
‘Upaniṣad’ means ‘sitting down near’. Each Upaniṣad presents a philosophical discourse with a seated guru, who imparts his esoteric wisdom about the meaning of the world. The first thirteen or ‘principal’ Upaniṣads form one of the foundational texts of Hinduism. Schopenhauer (348) called them ‘the production of the highest human wisdom’. The translator Juan Mascaró describes their spirit as ‘comparable with that of the New Testament’.
Tao te Ching 4th century BCE
Taoism sits beside Buddhism and Confucianism as one of the three great religions of China. It is based on the concept of the Tao, the ‘Way’, the universal source, pattern and substance of everything. Taoism differs from Confucianism in that it avoids ritual and hierarchy. The Tao te Ching provides practical advice for embracing the Tao through self-restraint and modesty.
Yes, it’s all in translation and the Penguin translations vary in quality, sometimes wildly. But even a bad translation is good in one way. It reminds you of the complexity of language and literature. Language is distilled thought. Sometimes it’s distilled as nectar and sometimes as acid. Literature can give you delight or dissolve your old ways of thinking. Sometimes, as in the work of Nietzsche, it can do both. You’ll find both delight and dissolution in the Penguin Classics. This history of the series is just delight.
Previously Pre-Posted on Papyrocentric Performativity
• Mocking Manning — a review of Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey (1918)
Papyrocentric Performativity 
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