The Penguin Classics Book

The Penguin Classics Book

About the Book

A historic guide to the world of Penguin Classics from its UK origin, covering a span from the ancient world to World War I, in a luxurious orange clothbound package with colored endpapers, full-color pages, and illustrations

A Penguin Classic Hardcover


Penguin Classics is the largest and best-known classics imprint in the world. The Penguin Classics Book covers all the greatest works of fiction, poetry, drama, history, and philosophy in between, this reader's companion encompasses 500 authors, 1,200 books, and 4,000 years of world literature, from ancient Mesopotamia to World War I. Filled with stories of the series' UK origin, author biographies, short book summaries and recommendations, and illustrated with historic Penguin Classic covers, The Penguin Classics Book is an entertaining historic look at the earliest chapters of the world's best-known Classics publisher.
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About the Author

Henry Eliot
Henry Eliot is the author of The Penguin Classics Book, The Penguin Modern Classics Book, Follow This Thread and Curiocity: An Alternative A-Z of London. An inveterate bookworm, Henry has tackled a number of bookish adventures, such as recreating Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, leading pilgrims from Southwark to Canterbury and retelling the tales along the way; mounting a quest for the Holy Grail based on Malory's Morte d'Arthur; swimming across the Hellespont from Europe to Asia on the bicentenary of Lord Byron's crossing (the subject of Byron's 1810 poem, 'Written after Swimming from Sestos to Abydos'); and reading Ulysses in real-time on Bloomsday, 16 June, starting at 8am with grilled kidneys and finishing in the early hours of the following morning. He produced an interactive edition of Shakespeare's The Tempest in collaboration with Sir Ian McKellen and Professor Sir Jonathan Bate, which Apple named one of the '10 best apps of 2016', and for five years he was an editor of the Penguin Classics series in London. Today he is one of the QI research elves and hosts the podcast On the Road with Penguin Classics, in which he travels to discuss books with guests including Frank Cottrell Boyce, Louis de Bernières, Rachel Joyce, Patience Agbabi, Andrew Motion and Will Self. More by Henry Eliot
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