Secondhand Penguin Classics Bargain Book Box SP2790

Secondhand Penguin Classics Bargain Book Box SP2790

A Colette shelf with an Austen shelf beside it: eight of Colette’s novels and memoirs from the Claudine years to The Last of Chéri, four Jane Austens in the Penguin English Library with the period portraits, four Fitzgeralds, Keats complete, Sophocles, Zorba and Spike Milligan’s Puckoon. Twenty-three vintage Penguins for someone who reads French and English fiction side by side.

1. Animal Farm — George Orwell — The animals throw out the farmer, the pigs take over, and the commandments change overnight. The Penguin Modern Classics edition with the pig-drawn chariot on the cover.
2. The Beautiful and Damned — F. Scott Fitzgerald — Anthony and Gloria are beautiful, rich on paper and waiting for a grandfather to die. They drink through the wait and it takes years. Fitzgerald’s bleakest, written from inside his own marriage.
3. The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and Other Stories — F. Scott Fitzgerald — A boy visits a schoolfriend whose family lives on a mountain made of one diamond, and learns why no guest ever leaves. The title story is Fitzgerald’s strangest; the others include May Day and The Rich Boy.
4. My Mother’s House and Sido — Colette — Her mother in the Burgundy garden at dawn, the cats, the brothers, the house that smelled of wax and jam. Colette’s loveliest book and the one to start with. Penguin Modern Classics.
5. My Apprenticeships and Music-Hall Sidelights — Colette — The husband who locked her in a room to write the Claudine novels and published them under his name, and the years on the music-hall stage that followed. Her score settled, forty years on.
6. Earthly Paradise — Colette — An autobiography built from passages of her own writing, arranged by Robert Phelps. The way in for a reader who doesn’t know where to start.
7. Claudine in Paris — Colette — The schoolgirl from Claudine at School is seventeen, in Paris, and has met her cousin Renaud. The second Claudine, and the one where she grows up.
8. Chéri and The Last of Chéri — Colette — Léa is forty-nine and Chéri is twenty-five, and she’s been keeping him for six years when his mother arranges his marriage. The sequel, after the war, is one of the saddest short novels in French. Penguin Modern Classics.
9. The Theban Plays — Sophocles — Oedipus works out who killed the old king and who his wife is, in a single day. Then Antigone buries her brother and is walled up for it. Penguin Classics, Watling translation.
10. This Side of Paradise — F. Scott Fitzgerald — Amory Blaine at Princeton, in love, at war, and broke by twenty-four. The 1920 debut that made Fitzgerald famous overnight and got him Zelda.
11. Silas Marner — George Eliot — A weaver cheated by his best friend hoards gold for fifteen years; the gold is stolen and a golden-haired child crawls in from the snow instead. The short Eliot, and the one people love.
12. Mansfield Park — Jane Austen — Fanny Price, the poor cousin, watches the house put on a play and watches Henry Crawford try to seduce her. The Austen novel readers fight about: is Fanny a prig or the only honest person in it? Penguin English Library.
13. The Complete Poems — John Keats — Everything, including the odes, Hyperion and the sonnet he wrote the night before he knew he was dying. Penguin English Poets.
14. Northanger Abbey — Jane Austen — Catherine Morland has read too many Gothic novels, so when she’s invited to an old abbey she goes looking for the murdered wife. Austen making fun of her own readers; the funniest of the six. Penguin English Library.
15. Puckoon — Spike Milligan — The 1924 Boundary Commission runs the Irish border through the village pub, so the bar’s in the Free State and the beer’s in Ulster. Milligan’s only novel, and his best writing outside the Goons.
16. All Said and Done — Simone de Beauvoir — The last volume of her memoirs: the 1960s, Sartre ageing, Algeria, the women’s movement arriving. Penguin.
17. Sense and Sensibility — Jane Austen — Elinor keeps her feelings in and Marianne lets hers out; both get hurt. The first Austen, and the one about sisters. Penguin English Library.
18. Tender Is the Night — F. Scott Fitzgerald — Dick Diver is a brilliant psychiatrist married to his richest patient, hosting the Riviera while he quietly comes apart. Fitzgerald thought it better than Gatsby. Penguin Modern Classics.
19. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde — Robert Louis Stevenson — Sixty pages, written in three days, and the twist everyone now knows was a secret in 1886. Still frightening if you read it as the lawyer does.
20. Zorba the Greek — Nikos Kazantzakis — A bookish narrator hires a Cretan miner who dances, drinks and tells him he’s wasting his life. The lignite mine fails and nothing else matters. Faber paper-covered edition.
21. The Captive — Colette — An older woman and a younger man in a Riviera villa, and the odd honesty of the arrangement. Late Colette, in Penguin Modern Classics.
22. Ripening Seed — Colette — Two sixteen-year-olds on the Brittany coast, friends since childhood, and the summer it changes. Banned as a serial in 1923. Penguin Modern Classics.
23. Persuasion — Jane Austen — Anne Elliot said no to a penniless sailor at nineteen because she was told to. Eight years on he comes back rich, and she’s still unmarried. The last and most grown-up Austen.