It’s incredible. I have such utter admiration and respect for the good people at Penguin. Somehow, every time I think they have reached the pinnacle of their creative powers, they go one better.
It started on their 70th birthday in 2005, when they released this.
Pocket Penguins are the most wonderful creation, and I include both the wheel and sliced bread in that assessment. I think the only thing that bothered me about them was how few other people I saw reading them. That and the idea that people might buy the box set purely so that it might gather dust. Very little in the world irritates me more than an unread book, and while I am to a degree guilty of this crime it is only because of the inevitability of reading a maximum of three books at a time and the simple fact that there are not yet enough hours in my day to do all the reading I would like.
But no matter. Penguin, bless them, provided the world with something infinitely more pleasurable to read on their daily commute than the current options of Metro or Herald AM [the latter is barely tolerable, the former not at all].
Penguin being Penguin, they remained unsatisfied. Realising that there must surely be some greater goal for them, they came up with forty great ideas. What utter bliss. Where before fiction had been celebrated, now the non-fiction world would have its day of glory. And what a day that was - Nietzsche, Paine, Orwell, Seneca, Aurelius, Wollstonecraft, Darwin. Brilliant. All, quite literally, brilliant.
Surely, I thought, this must be the end. No one publishing house can be so frankly fantastic as to go a step further. How wrong I was…
Yesterday, as I strolled casually through the basement of Easons, intent on acquiring a spanish dictionary (which for the record I did), I found this. Homer. Ovid. Virgil. Sinbad! Even Malory. Sometimes you have to choose between speechlessness and a simple ‘wow’. In the absence of visuals, I’ll go with the latter.
Wow.
In a no-doubt disturbing fashion, when I see things like this in bookshops my immediate reaction is “<Pause> Let us pray”.. It’s quite plausible that the gods of literature & stationery supplies are the only ones I really believe in. Plausible in my world anyway. It may just be that I’m a complete lunatic but I’d rather believe my over-enthusiasm is utterly justified and that anyone who doesn’t share it is a philistine.
I was good though. I didn’t buy them. I initially picked up five of them (bear in mind that they’re €7 each). But then I decided to be good. So I stuck to the dictionary.
Yes, I do think I deserve a medal…
