Penguin Great Ideas

7 September 06.

This is Design.

While I was hissing and spitting about the demise of the beautiful paperbacks recently I somehow managed to miss the Penguin Great Ideas series (and two) I came across today on SVN.

Two series of twenty books, bound small and tight with simple, image-free covers decorated with beautiful type and vignettes designed by David Pearson. I want to own them all. I might even read them, maybe.

Still, too expensive, though. It’s not exactly my 3 euro book in a newsagent. The ones I checked out in the bookshop at lunch were about €7.80, and for something that is more a pamphlet than a book. Also, they are hidden all over the place in whichever category each essay is deemed to belong to. Philosophy, sociology, etc. It would be easier to buy the whole collection online, but Penguin, despite delivering free to the UK (including Northern Ireland!) want to charge me £2 sterling per book for posting and packaging because I’m “international”. The War of Independence cost us dearly, I’m telling you. It’s still costing us, every day.

Comments

  1. Agreed. They ought to just sell the whole display. Saw these a while back at a Barnes & Noble, all together on a cardboard display. Looked quite nice as a set. wanted to instantly buy the lot. But how would they translate spine-out amidst the rest of our collections? They were created to be objects above all. I think they should have thought about equally as attractive display options.

    — jaime Morrison  Sep 9, 12:21 AM  #

  2. They are distinctly unimpressive spine-out. Too narrow to even be noticed. I guess you could frame them on your wall, or put them under a glass plate on your coffee table. This would also remove the temptation to read them.

    — Pierce  Sep 9, 01:28 AM  #

  3. If you like Pierce I can act as a book trafficker. If they’re as small as you say I can sellotape them to my chest and slip through customs.

    — James  Sep 11, 10:08 AM  #

  4. They’re lovely, indeed. I fell for them at a bookshop in SOHO last week. There are a few other (admittedly lesser) sources, for instance the Dover Thrift Editions and the Librio 2€ (formerly Librio 10FF) series.

    — Jack Rusher  Sep 26, 06:17 PM  #

  5. Hey, thanks. Hadn’t heard of either of these. They come in even cheaper than the average second-hand.

    I guess they keep prices down by cutting out the middle-man. Would they be this cheap on the shelves?

    — Pierce  Sep 26, 08:01 PM  #

  6. They’ve got a big box of the Dover Thrifts for 1€ each outside Shakespeare & Company in Paris (the other contender, along with the Winding Stair, for the Platonic Ideal of a bookshop), and Amazon UK has them on offer from £0.95.

    The Librios really are 2€ each, but they’re also in French, which some find off-putting.

    — Jack Rusher  Sep 27, 01:16 PM  #