Lately, the people at
The Observer sound a little
obsessed about the new editions of classics in general and the new Penguin Reds in particular.
It's true that the plot of a classic can be niftily reduced to an alluring drop of pure soap ('in a house haunted by memories, the past is everywhere ...' begins the breathless synopsis on the back of the Penguin Reds edition of Wuthering Heights) but that won't change the fact that if it is, say, a 19th-century novel, it will - oh dear - have an awful lot of words in it.Actually, when we posted
about this edition, we thought that the synopsis was pretty good. Apart from the actual novel, it must be the only good thing about this edition.
Rachel Cooke, author of the article, also says
But they're all at it - publishers, I mean. As the Bookseller wryly notes, classics make sense to publishers not only because there are no royalties or advances to be paid; there is no frustrating wait for the 'break-out' book from Tolstoy or Dickens. First out of the trap was Penguin, with its Red Classics: mighty books stripped bare of their stuffy notes and prefaces, given parrot-bright covers, and treated as if they were published yesterday.Somehow we have always disliked the idea of classics without explanatory notes. We will only miss the introduction if it's a good one - there are introductions that would put you off books. And what to say about the
neck-covers that we are still having nightmares about? Partly because they will keep on bringing them up! So, in short, we prefer the good old
'Penguin Blacks' with all their enhancing 'extras'.
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