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Imprimaturs

Publishing houses and colleges/universities are both at times in the business of classic books. Publishers have their ‘classic book’ lines, while universities and colleges have their ‘required reading lists’. If these books are the works of literature that well-read people are supposed to have read or at least be familiar with, then the genesis of the classic book genre and the processes through which texts are considered for selection (or not) is of interest. The development of the Penguin Classic line of books, among the most well-known of the classic imprints, can serve as an example.

Penguin Books, the parent company of Penguin Classics, had its inception during the 1930s when the founder, Alan Lane, was unable to find a book he actually wanted to read while at Exeter train station. As the company website tells it:

“Appalled by the selection on offer, Lane decided that good quality contemporary fiction should be made available at an attractive price and sold not just in traditional bookshops, but also in railway stations, tobacconists and chain stores.”

Sir Alan, in speaking of Penguin Books, is quoted on the company's website that “We believed in the existence in this country of a vast reading public and staked everything on it.” Within the first year, they had sold 3 million paperbacks of then-contemporary authors, such as Ernest Hemingway, Agatha Christie and Andre Maurois. Even so, the unarguable success of their Classics line was not a sure thing. Who could have known that E.V. Rieu's translation of “The Odyssey” (by Homer), would become a best-seller in the millions? As the official history is related from the Penguin Classic group:

“Ignoring the doubts of his colleagues, Allen Lane not only instantly agreed to publish the translation, but invited Rieu to edit a new series of Classics. It was a typical Lane decision, an instinctive leap, a certainty that an eager audience existed for new and accessible translations, one that Rieu's achievement had clearly created. It was not so much a gamble as an act of faith against all odds and a body of evidence that would have convinced any rational publisher guided solely by the balance sheet.”

The point of relating this particular company’s early history is that even Penguin Classics started with a choice. Sir Alan Lane chose that first book as important and not to someone else, but to him.