Secondhand Literary Classics Bargain Book Box SP2779

Secondhand Classic Literature Bargain Book Box — 23 Books

Five Arthur Conan Doyle titles — four Sherlock Holmes volumes plus The Hound of the Baskervilles — give this box an immediate appeal for Holmes devotees, while Patrick White's The Vivisector is the most literarily distinguished title: a Nobel Prize winner's most savage and brilliant examination of the artistic temperament. The Continental European classics are exceptional — two André Gide novels, Stendhal's underrated Lucien Leuwen, Fontane's Effi Briest, and Flaubert's Madame Bovary in the same box. Three Australian classics (Dennis, Clarke, Lawson), two Shakespeare plays, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Hobbes's Leviathan complete a collection of genuine breadth and intellectual weight.

1. The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes — Arthur Conan Doyle — Penguin Books. Stories collected and introduced by Richard Lancelyn Green, drawing on the Holmes canon beyond the four novels and standard collections. Essential for dedicated Holmes readers who want everything.
2. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes — Arthur Conan Doyle — Penguin Books. The collection that killed Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls — and contains some of the finest stories in the canon, including The Final Problem and The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual.
3. The Apprentice — Wilda Moxham — Real Books.
4. The Sentimental Bloke and Other Verse — C.J. Dennis — The verse narrative that became one of the most beloved works in Australian literature, following Bill the Bloke through larrikin courtship and marriage in the language of the Melbourne working class. Published in 1915 and never out of print since.
5. For the Term of His Natural Life — Marcus Clarke — Australian Classic edition. The great Australian convict novel — brutal, morally serious, and still the most powerful account of the transportation system in Australian fiction. Essential reading for anyone interested in the country's colonial history.
6. Joe Wilson's Mates — Henry Lawson — Fifty-six stories from the prose works of one of Australia's most important short story writers, in the Currey O'Neil Australian Classics series. Lawson wrote the bush, the battler, and the mateship of ordinary working life with a democratic sympathy that defined an era.
7. Leviathan — Thomas Hobbes — Penguin Classics. The foundational text of modern political philosophy — Hobbes's argument for the social contract and sovereign power, written in the shadow of civil war. "The life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" remains the most famous sentence in political theory.
8. Paradise Lost — John Milton — Penguin Classics. The greatest poem in the English language after Shakespeare — Satan's fall, Adam and Eve's temptation, and the entire architecture of Christian cosmology rendered in blank verse of extraordinary power. No library of classics is complete without it.
9. A Study in Scarlet — Arthur Conan Doyle — Penguin Books. The novel that introduced Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson — the first meeting at St Bartholomew's Hospital, the Baker Street lodgings, and a murder mystery reaching back to the American desert. The origin of everything.
10. The Valley of Fear — Arthur Conan Doyle — Penguin Books. The last of the four Holmes novels, featuring Moriarty's shadow and a mystery set partly in an American mining community. Often underrated, and one of the most structurally inventive of the Holmes narratives.
11. The Portable Dickens — Charles Dickens, edited by Angus Wilson — A substantial selection from across Dickens's fiction and journalism, edited by one of Britain's finest novelists with the authority of genuine admiration. The ideal introduction for new readers and a reliable companion for those who know him well.
12. The Counterfeiters — André Gide — Penguin Modern Classics. Gide's masterpiece — a novel about a novelist writing a novel, circling around a group of Parisian schoolboys and their elders with extraordinary formal self-consciousness. The first French novel to call itself a novel.
13. Strait is the Gate and The Vatican Cellars — André Gide — Penguin Modern Classics, translated by Dorothy Bussy. Two novellas in one volume: the austere religious tragedy of Strait is the Gate and the anarchic, comic Vatican Cellars, which introduced the concept of the "gratuitous act" into literary discourse.
14. The Vivisector — Patrick White — The Nobel Prize-winning author at his most unsparing — a novel about the painter Hurtle Duffield, his gifts, his cruelties, and his lifelong project of turning everyone he loves into material. White's most ferocious examination of the artistic temperament and the most demanding novel in this box.
15. King Lear — William Shakespeare — New Penguin Shakespeare. The greatest of the tragedies — an old king, his three daughters, a storm on the heath, and the most devastating exploration of love, power, and madness in the English language.
16. The Hound of the Baskervilles — Arthur Conan Doyle — Puffin Classics. The most celebrated Holmes novel, in which the great detective investigates a family curse on the Dartmoor moors. The plot mechanics remain as perfectly constructed now as when Doyle published it.
17. Persuasion — Jane Austen — Penguin Classics. Austen's final novel, written as she was dying, and her most autumnal and emotionally direct — Anne Elliot's second chance with Captain Wentworth after years of separation. Many readers consider it her most moving.
18. Romeo and Juliet — William Shakespeare — Wordsworth Classics. The tragedy of "these violent delights" that "have violent ends" — Shakespeare's most perfectly constructed romantic catastrophe, and the play that invented the template for every doomed love story since.
19. The Ruba'iyat of Omar Khayyam — Omar Khayyam — Penguin Classics. The twelfth-century Persian astronomer-poet's quatrains in Edward FitzGerald's Victorian translation — a meditation on wine, roses, mortality, and the pleasures of the present moment that became one of the most widely read poems in the English language.
20. Lucien Leuwen — Stendhal — Penguin Classics. Stendhal's unfinished novel — less celebrated than The Red and the Black or The Charterhouse of Parma but equally rich, following a young idealist through military life and provincial politics. The readers who know it rate it among his best.
21. Effi Briest — Theodor Fontane — Penguin Classics. The great German novel of the nineteenth century — a young woman married to a much older man, a brief affair, and the social machinery that destroys her years later. Comparable to Madame Bovary and, for many readers, its equal.
22. Madame Bovary — Gustave Flaubert — Penguin Classics. The novel that defined literary realism — Emma Bovary's desire, her provincial entrapment, and Flaubert's cold, perfect prose. One of a small number of novels that genuinely changed what fiction could do.
23. Vanity Fair — William Thackeray — Penguin English Library. Thackeray's great satirical panorama of English society during the Napoleonic wars, following the irrepressible social climber Becky Sharp across drawing rooms, battlefields, and bankruptcy. One of the most entertaining long novels in English.