Gentleman has a collection of the first 100 Penguin Books published.
https://spitalfieldslife.com/2023/05/29/the-first-hundred-penguin-books-i/
That’s a fascinating post on what looks like a fascinating blog. Thanks for sharing it.
I have a special affinity for Penguin because when I first started collecting PG Wodehouse many years ago, that was the form in which the books were most widely available. In fact, at the time, it may have been the only edition that was available new.
The Penguin editions were a practical and inexpensive way to begin acquiring Wodehouse, but they also appealed to the collector’s aesthetic because for many years they were all of uniform design, with elegant white covers on which was centered a colourful illustration by artist Chris Riddell, and they had all had identical orange spines with identical lettering.
Later Penguin editions altered this design and finally abandoned it altogether, but by then I had become interested in collecting original editions. Unlike the latter, the Penguins have virtually no commercial value, but to me they’re a treasured part of my Wodehouse collection.
Yeah, I have a small collection of the green Penguin murder mysteries. Besides being the only format some of the books are available in, they’re just gosh darn cute.
My university library had nearly all (if not all) Wodehouses’s books. If I was working late in the library, I’d often snag a carrel near that section and pull out a book to read when I’d take a break.
(sorry, I just came here to see attic penguins)
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Brilliant thread title.
‘The W Plan’, which was #50, is the only one of these I’m aware that I’ve got.
Originally they had a paper dust jacket over the paper cover. I would guess many people discarded these over the years (as I did) when they got tattered.
I realize I have collected Penguins myself, although I haven’t thought about them in a while. I first collected all the Maigret books in various Penguin versions (no consistency at all there, some very old and in bad condition, some newer and better). Then, a few years ago I started collecting the new Penguin version of Maigret in the larger format (and only one title per book except for short stories), and now I have all of those (I used to order them from Amazon UK because US publication was months later). Unfortunately, there are a fair number of short stories that are missing that it looks like Penguin will not be re-publishing. It seems like they could get another book out of that many stories, but I guess there isn’t the market for them. Oh, I just checked again, and it appears Maigret’s Pipe has been republished as The New Investigations of Inspector Maigret, and it’s available in the US. Time to order.
Would you settle for an Atticus Finch?
Slight hijack, but a few years back my wife and I had tickets to see “Hamilton” in Kansas City. We decided to make the whole weekend a “stay-cation” and booked a room in a hotel in downtown KC that was part art gallery/part hotel. They had about a half dozen fiberglass penguins, roughly four feet tall, that they would move around randomly throughout the day. You might find one in a hallway, or stairway, or several in an elevator when the doors opened. It was kind of funny, you never knew where they were going to show up.
So yeah, “attic penguins”… I was expecting something like that.
Penguins must read upside down. The lettering on the spines is going the wrong way!