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10 unusual facts about Penguin Classics


Delarivier Manley

The more accessible edition of The New Atalantis, which Rosalind Ballaster turned into a Penguin Classic, brought Manley wider recognition among students of early eighteenth-century literature.

Don Share

His other books include: Seneca in English (Penguin Classics) and I Have Lots of Heart (Bloodaxe Books, 1997), a selected collection of Miguel Hernández, for which Share received the Times Literary Supplement Translation Prize and Premio Valle Inclán Prize for Translation from the UK Society of Authors.

John D. Smith

In 2009 he published an abridged translation of the Mahabharata with Penguin Classics.

Penguin Classics

A feature of the World's Biggest Bookstore in Toronto, Canada, from its inception in the 1970s, and for years thereafter, was that it stocked all of the Penguin Classics titles, for notoriety's sake.

Plaza del Potro

The reference in Don Quixote can be found in the Penguin Classics edition, translated by John D. Rutherford, in Chapter III as " ... Potro in Cordova ...", and in the Barnes and Noble edition, translated by Tobias Smollett, in Chapter III as " ... the spout of Cordoba ...".

Syed Ali Akbar

He has been referenced in the books Locating Home: India's Hyderabadis Abroad by Karen Isaksen Leonard, published by Stanford University Press (2007) and by E. M. Forster in his classic book A Passage To India published by Penguin Classics.

Tamas Galambos

His 1981 painting 'Summer' is featured on the book cover of the Penguin Classics edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez.

The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories

The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories is Penguin Classics' third omnibus edition of works by 20th-century American author H. P. Lovecraft.

The Jewel of Seven Stars

The 2008 Penguin Classics edition of The Jewel of Seven Stars, edited by Kate Hebblethwaite, restored the original text, including the original ending and Chapter XVI, and included the second, upbeat ending as an appendix.

The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories

The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories is Penguin Classics' second omnibus edition of works by 20th-century American author H. P. Lovecraft.


La Rabouilleuse

The Black Sheep is the title of the English translation by Donald Adamson published by Penguin Classics.

Magnus Magnusson

Among these are several works by Halldór Laxness, the Nobel prize-winning novelist from Iceland, and a number of Norse sagas which he co-translated (with Hermann Pálsson) for the Penguin Classics series: Njal's Saga (1960), The Vinland Sagas (1965), King Harald's Saga (1966) and Laxdaela Saga (1969).

Robert Baldick

Robert Baldick (1927–1972) was a British scholar of French literature, writer, joint editor of the Penguin Classics series with Betty Radice, and a well-known translator.

The Twelve Caesars

Robert Graves, though most famous for his historical novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God (later dramatized by the BBC), made a widely read translation of The Twelve Caesars which was first published in Penguin Classics in 1957.