Penguin Classics: Catalogue

Oct 6, 2024 4:33 PM

In 1946, E. V. Rieu's groundbreaking translation of The Odyssey established a cultural legacy that would bring the world's most compelling and influential literature to millions of readers around the globe. For over sixty-five years, Penguin Classics have been making works that were once the sole preserve of academics accessible to everyone; this catalogue offers a complete list of all titles in print across the list - more than 1,200 books, from Aristotle and Austen, to Zola and Zamyatin.

'The Penguin Classics, though I designed them to give pleasure even more than instruction, have been hailed as the greatest educative force of the twentieth century. And far be it for me to quarrel with that encomium, for there is no one whom they have educated more than myself' E. V. Rieu

Reviews

You can't write, read, or live fully in the present without knowing the literature of the past. Penguin Classics opens the door to a treasure house of pure pleasure, books that have never been bettered

—— John Mortimer

Performs a valuable service by blowing the dust off our stodgy, conventional conception of the library to reveal the living heart of cultures that beats beneath its stone facade

—— Los Angeles Times

An erudite, companionable, joyful book... Thrilling

—— Spectator

Matthew Battles touches on almost all the important subjects, through fascinating stories... The book is full of all sorts of treasures

—— Times Literary Supplement

An extraordinary work of scholarship. It not only places the history of Western thought in perspective, but offers new insights concerning the evolution of our thinking and the future of the whole human enterprise

—— John E. Mack, winner of the Pulitzer Prize

The best intellectual history of the West in one volume I have ever seen. No other such overview provides, in equal compass, as clear and cogent a survey, Its scholarship is impeccable

—— Huston Smith, author of The World's Religions

The most thrilling narrative of the West's 3000-year odyssey in pursuit of truth accessible to a broad public... A work of genius

—— Hellenic Journal

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