Secondhand Literary Classics Bargain Book Box SP4080

Secondhand Literary Classics Bargain Book Box SP4080

Twenty classics for a reader starting a shelf: four Penguin orange-stripe reissues (Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Pride and Prejudice), the Wordsworth Collector’s Wuthering Heights, Moby Dick and Gulliver’s in the clothbound editions, To Kill a Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye, The Plague, Frankenstein, Middlemarch and Alice. Most in near-new condition.

1. Hothouse — Brian Aldiss — Earth has stopped turning and a single banyan tree covers a continent; humans are tiny, green and prey. Aldiss’s Hugo-winning fever dream. Penguin Modern Classics.
2. A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas — Virginia Woolf — Five hundred a year and a lockable door: Woolf’s argument about women and writing, with the angrier sequel. Vintage.
3. Gulliver’s Travels — Jonathan Swift — Lilliput, Brobdingnag, the floating island and the horses who rule men. A children’s book on top and the most savage satire in English underneath. Clothbound.
4. Moby Dick — Herman Melville — Ishmael, Queequeg, Ahab and the whale. Clothbound hardback with the wave-pattern cover.
5. The Forsyte Saga — John Galsworthy — Soames Forsyte, a man of property, and the wife who won’t be owned. Three novels in one; the TV series came from this. Wordsworth.
6. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass — Lewis Carroll — Both Alices with the Tenniel pictures. Penguin Classics.
7. A Streetcar Named Desire and Other Plays — Tennessee Williams — Streetcar, The Glass Menagerie and Sweet Bird of Youth. Blanche, Laura and the Princess. Penguin.
8. Villette — Charlotte Brontë — Lucy Snowe teaches at a Brussels school and loves a man she can’t have, in the novel Brontë readers rate above Jane Eyre. Penguin Classics.
9. Wuthering Heights — Emily Brontë — Heathcliff hangs a dog, digs up a grave and ruins two generations out of spite. Wordsworth Collector’s hardback.
10. Breakfast at Tiffany’s — Truman Capote — Holly Golightly, the cat with no name, and the narrator who loved her without a chance. Penguin orange-stripe.
11. The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald — Parties for a woman across the bay who never comes. Penguin orange-stripe.
12. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button — F. Scott Fitzgerald — Born seventy, dies a baby, and the stories around it. Penguin orange-stripe.
13. Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen — Elizabeth and Darcy insult each other for three hundred pages and then don’t. Penguin orange-stripe.
14. Frankenstein — Mary Shelley — The creature learns to read from Paradise Lost and asks his maker for a wife. Dell paperback.
15. Middlemarch — George Eliot — Dorothea marries the wrong man, Lydgate marries the wrong woman, and a whole town watches. The novel most novelists name as the best in English. Penguin Popular Classics.
16. To Kill a Mockingbird — Harper Lee — Scout, Atticus, Boo Radley, and the trial. Arrow edition.
17. The Sign of the Four — Arthur Conan Doyle — The Agra treasure, the one-legged man and a chase down the Thames. Holmes’s second case, and Watson’s wife. Collins Classics.
18. The Plague — Albert Camus — Oran is sealed off and Dr Rieux keeps working. Read very differently since 2020. Penguin Modern Classics.
19. The Catcher in the Rye — J.D. Salinger — Holden Caulfield’s three days in New York. The silver Penguin edition.
20. Tender Is the Night — F. Scott Fitzgerald — Dick Diver’s slow fall on the Riviera. Penguin orange-stripe.