Penguins on Parade: Penguin 60s Classics!

Some Penguin Classics were custom-made to be very handy for traveling, which makes them extra-poignant in the Boston of February 2015, in which nobody packs bags or quick satchels because travel of any kind is impossible and has been for many, many weeks. All flights into or out of Logan Airport have been cancelled, and the large electronic announcement-boards that once told travelers the status of their flights have been dismantled, boxed up, and shipped to more fortunate cities for use in their airports. All roadways were first closed by order of the National Guard and have now been buried under many feet of the snow which has fallen continuously in howling, ripping gales for the last several years. The plucky I’m-an-individual A-holes who thought they’d turn that frown upside-down and don skis for traveling across snow-covered thoroughfares have all been killed and eaten by starving natives driven to such desperation by the shuttering of their fifteen local Dunkin Donuts. There are no sidewalks; the narrow, winding goat-paths battered out by the first waves of evacuating citizenry have long since first frozen over and then been buried in fresh snow. But there’s no need for sidewalks in any case, since it’s not possible to leave the house – twenty-foot snowpacks have blocked all doors and windows for many weeks, and those snowpacks themselves have been reinforced by fifty-foot-tall man-thick icicles extending from the roof to what used to be known as the “ground.”

So one of the two clear design-intentions of the famous Penguin Classics ’60s’ – the little square paperbacks the publisher produced in joyous profusion to mark its 60^th anniversary of business – is now thwarted: these cute little things were clearly designed both for quick reading – they’re no more than 80 pages apiece – and for quick access, capable of being slipped into a pocket on the way out the door. But nobody in Boston goes out the door anymore. The door was first snow-blocked and then ice-frozen shut, and more snow is falling as I type this, and much more snow is forecast in the upcoming months, followed by freezing sleet, followed by sub-zero temperatures (for a long stretch last week, fey meteorologists from other parts of the world commented, correctly, that Boston was at that point colder than any other place on Earth; none of those meteorologists was cruel enough to add that Boston was also colder than the equatorial regions of Mars). So traveling with my Penguin 60s is out of the question.

But that still leaves enjoying them, and that’s no small thing, because these are very, very enjoyable little books.

The aforementioned joyous profusion was nerdily sub-categorized, of course (this is Penguin we’re talking about, after all), with different color-codings for different kinds of 60s classics – orange spines for some, black spines for others (there was also a sotto voce sub-categorization of a type also typical of Penguin: a different and slightly brainier set of titles was chosen for UK-only distribution. If asked, Penguin would say this was for copyright reasons, but the whiff of colonial condescension is mighty pronounced). The color-coding doesn’t make much sense in this case, but it certainly breaks up the look of these things on the shelf.

And the 60s themselves are fascinating. At first glance, they seem entirely traditional: a little bit of Beowulf, a few essays of Montaigne, a dialogue from Plato, some short stories by acknowledged masters, etc. But the more you actually read these charming little things, the more you realize how effectively they shift canonical feelings rather than reinforce them.

There are no Introductions. There are no notes. There’s none of the scene-setting for which Penguin Classics are renowned these days. And most of the works themselves are presented free from their own contexts: you get the Sherlock Holmes story “The Man with the Twisted Lip” – not in a collection of Arthur Conan Doyle stories, nor even in an anthology of Victorian crime fiction, but rather just standing there, on its own (well, “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot” is included as well, but you take my meaning). You get Livy’s account of Hannibal crossing the Alps – but only that, not the rest of Livy. Same thing with the enormity of Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – here, you just get 85 pages of Gibbon’s thoughts on the subject, not three 800-page books. True, you get the entirety of such short works as Rimbaud’s “A Season in Hell” or the “Lysistrata” of Aristophanes, but even in such cases, there’s something oddly new-seeming about getting just the slim translation, with no supporting material or contextualization. As strange as it seems, it really can prompt a fresh examination of the works themselves.

Of course, they’re not for everybody. I once handed somebody a gift of the Penguin 60s Classic of Eudora Welty’s famous short story “Why I Live at the PO” and watched as the recipient recoiled in horror and outright refused to accept it (ah, the gracelessness of today’s young people – one of the world’s truly inexhaustible resources) – not because the story isn’t its usual sublime self, but because of the format of the little paperback. But I myself used to love popping one of these little things into a pocket or shoulder-bag when I was headed out for a day that might be long on unforeseen waiting periods and short on good reading material.

I don’t do that anymore, of course. I don’t go outside anymore. I can’t go outside anymore. Which means I’ll miss Penguin’s celebration of their 80^th anniversary, which I hear is going to take the form of an entirely new set of little black paperbacks. That celebration will happen out in the wider world where people still have kinds of weather that aren’t snow and freezing sleet.

But I’ll always have my memories of such a world. And I’ll always have these cute little Penguin 60s Classics … at least until I run low on kindling.