Secondhand Classic Literature Bargain Book Box SP2906

Secondhand Classic Literature Bargain Book Box SP2906

Twenty-four vintage Penguin and Faber paperbacks spanning two millennia — Chaucer to Colette, Seneca to John Wyndham, Victor Serge to Muriel Spark. Each book is a small artefact of mid-twentieth-century publishing at its most elegant, and every one of them is worth reading.

1. David Copperfield — Charles Dickens (Penguin English Library) — Dickens's most autobiographical novel, and by many accounts his greatest, in the classic Penguin English Library edition.
2. Brave New World — Aldous Huxley (Penguin Modern Classics) — the twentieth century's most prescient dystopia, which predicted comfort rather than cruelty as the instrument of control.
3. Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets — Thomas De Quincey (Penguin) — De Quincey's accounts of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey: equal parts memoir, criticism, and gossip.
4. Ten Novels and Their Authors — W. Somerset Maugham (Penguin) — Maugham's celebrated essays on the ten novels he considered the greatest in the world, a masterpiece of readable criticism.
5. The Chrysalids — John Wyndham (Penguin) — post-apocalyptic science fiction of rare moral seriousness and emotional power. One of Wyndham's finest.
6. The Canterbury Tales — Chaucer (Penguin Classics, translated by Nevill Coghill) — the definitive modern-English translation, which remains one of the most entertaining books ever written.
7. The Day of the Triffids — John Wyndham (Penguin) — a man wakes from an operation to find most of the world blind, and the triffids have been waiting for exactly this moment.
8. The Bachelors — Muriel Spark (Penguin) — a sharp, wickedly funny Spark novel of London bachelors, a fake medium, and the permanent condition of being outside proper society.
9. The Case of Comrade Tulayev — Victor Serge (Penguin Modern Classics) — a Soviet functionary is shot, and the investigation destroys everyone connected to him. One of the great political novels.
10. The Distracted Preacher and Other Tales — Thomas Hardy (Penguin English Library) — Hardy's short fiction, including smuggling, rural life, and the comedy of social misunderstanding.
11. On Liberty / Representative Government / The Subjection of Women — John Stuart Mill (Penguin) — three foundational texts of liberal political philosophy in one volume.
12. Madame Bovary — Gustave Flaubert (Penguin Classics) — the novel that invented modern fiction.
13. The Outward Urge — John Wyndham and Lucas Parkes (Penguin) — Wyndham's science fiction of humanity's compulsion toward space, across generations of one family.
14. Four Tragedies and Octavia — Seneca (Penguin Classics) — the Roman philosopher's plays, which gave Elizabethan dramatists their template for revenge tragedy.
15. Birth of Our Power — Victor Serge (Penguin) — Serge's revolutionary novel of Barcelona and the impossible choices of a Spanish uprising. A masterpiece.
16. The Romantic Manifesto — Ayn Rand — Rand's philosophical essays on aesthetics and the nature of art, characteristically combative and impossible to ignore.
17. The Penguin Book of Scottish Verse — introduced and edited by Tom Scott — a comprehensive anthology of Scottish poetry from the earliest times to the modern day.
18. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Weir of Hermiston — Robert Louis Stevenson (The World's Classics) — the most famous tale of duality in English fiction, paired with Stevenson's unfinished final novel.
19. Men in Prison — Victor Serge (Penguin) — Serge's shattering fictional memoir of imprisonment, drawn from his own experience in tsarist Russia.
20. The Blacks — Jean Genet (Faber) — Genet's explosive anti-colonial play, still one of the most confronting theatrical works of the twentieth century.
21. Twentieth Century German Verse — edited by Patrick Bridgwater (Penguin Poets) — a bilingual anthology of German poetry from Rilke to the 1960s.
22. Word Six and Other Stories — Anton Chekhov (Signet Classic) — Chekhov's short fiction including his most harrowing tale of institutional cruelty.
23. The Life of a Useless Man — Maxim Gorky (translated by Moura Budberg, Penguin) — Gorky's portrait of a police spy in pre-revolutionary Russia, comic and damning in equal measure.
24. The Pure and the Impure — Colette (Penguin) — Colette's frank and beautiful meditation on love, desire, and the people who exist outside society's definitions.