Penguin Great Ideas - Making the Intellectual Accessible

In 1946 George Orwell wrote, “there are also those books, chiefly Penguins and cheap editions, which one buys and then loses or throws away.” An amusing irony, as the quote is from the title essay of Books v. Cigarettes, a small essay collection and one of 100 books in the Penguin Great Ideas series. This series has taken select-works from notable thinkers of the last 2000 years and released them, without foreword or introduction, in volumes of approximately 100 pages.

I discovered the series in a way that would make Orwell proud; with bookshop loitering. As Orwell notes (although the context is crazy people in secondhand shops), bookshops are one of the few places you can hang around at without spending any money. By taking my time, free from the usual rat race, my eyes eventually fell on the only Great Ideas book left in stock. The series design is both uniform, in being simple, striking, and bold, while also being unique. For example, Books v. Cigarettes has an old Penguin header added, complete with 3/6. This represents 3 shillings sixpence, the then-currency and cost of Penguin books at the time of Orwell's criticism. The difference: these are no longer books to carelessly lose or throw away.

Books v. Cigarettes may be the 57th book in the series, but it is a very fitting place to begin because it explicitly makes clear both how far Penguin have come and the company's continued faith to its roots. In terms of appearance, the design is uncanny (see picture below). But it is about more than appearance. What is key is the incentive. In 1946 (the year of Orwell's essay) Penguin released their first classic, The Odyssey, as an inexpensive paperback. Penguin had one clear goal: To make high-quality reading more accessible to the masses. This is greatest success of Great Ideas.

 

To give an example of effectiveness, all of Orwell's books in the series (Books v. Cigarettes is one of four) are derived from the Penguin Classics book, Essays by George Orwell. Logically speaking Essays is superior. It has an introduction and all of Orwell's essays are compiled in one place. There's just one flaw: us. We may be able to appreciate logic, and may even use it, but we are also influenced (and thus sometimes inhibited) by the very things (emotions, quirks, inconsistencies) that make us human. I say Essays by George Orwell, you yawn -- and yawn to your detriment, if Books v. Cigarettes is anything to go by.

There is so much more to Orwell than his well-known fiction. With cruel humour he points out how those driven by 'What did you do in the Great War, Daddy?' posters returned as fathers to conscientious objectors, challenging our popular perceptions. He also gives account of his abusive middle-upper class upbringing, which seems part-responsible for his patriotism, in spite of priding his individualism. He recounts his experience, as a boy, of being scrutinized by an old man in a sweet shop, and thinking -with terror- that the man was a spy for his headmaster. You get a real sense of the intense inspirations that Orwell later transformed into fiction.



To give another example, what if you saw a 300 page book titled Letters from a Stoic, a compiled collection of letters sent by the stoic philosopher Seneca, 2000 years ago? Again, eyes glaze over. In the Great Ideas series, three letters (essentially essays prefixed with 'Dear') have been chosen and released with a far more tantalizing title, On the Shortness of Life***. Again, I thoroughly recommend the book. It contains so much wisdom that I am tempted to blame Aliens.

 

The reality is that we have not come very far, in terms of values and culture. Some might argue that we have regressed. What cannot be disputed is our unchanged nature. Seneca talks of how we should buy enough books for use, and none just for embellishment. 2000 years later, Orwell complains of the superficial, and how it is easy to sell Dickens, due to hearsay, but that then-modern readers would rather read then-modern trash, and have a fear of the old.

The ideal, to link back to accessibility, would be for readers to furnish their minds, not their shelves (or both). Many of us buy books with good intention and want to better understand and enjoy life. Unfortunately they sit gathering dust. They are intimidating, and progress seems too slow, particularly in an age of text messages and Twitter.

Logic and good intention are not enough. However, it is not necessary to dumb-down texts. To empower good intention we need understand and take advantage of our human (emotional and superficial) tendencies. In a word, we need gratification. Penguin Great Ideas are gratifying to the eye, give a feeling of progress (due to manageable size), and their quality of content gratifies the mind. The series may not be without criticism (Phallocentric and Eurocentric labels have been thrown around), but any series that can make the intimidating and intellectual accessible is deserving of high praise.



*** I just realized, and must apologize for, my error. Letters from a Stoic does not contain the three pieces in On the Shortness of Life. These are from the Penguin Classics text Dialogues and Letters. The point about repackaging with a better title still stands, but this book is only 160 pages long, not the specified 300. A better example is the Penguin Great Ideas book On the Consolation of his Wife by Plutarch. This book takes an excellent selection from a 448 page Penguin Classics text, Essays by Plutarch. My confusion in conveying this information illustrates one criticism of the series; that the origins of works, and whether they are full texts or excerpts, is seldom clear.