Penguin 60s
Publisher: Penguin Books. Country: U.K. Date: 1995.
A Visitation of the Plague by Daniel Defoe
Penguin Books, 1996 (Penguin 60s Classics). Paperback. 55 pages.
This book contains an extract from the Penguin Classics edition of Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year.
PENGUIN 60S (PENGUIN BOOKS)
Series Note: This series comprised several sets of low-priced texts published in 1995 to celebrate Penguin's 60th anniversary (that is, 60 years since the company's founding in 1935) and published at 60p per volume.
This series may be considered under three headings:
(1) Orange 60s
A set of 60 titles published with orange spines and were reprinted texts taken from great works of world literature, both fiction and non-fiction (of the 19th and 20th centuries).
(2) Penguin 60s Classics
A set of 60 titles published with black spines and were reprinted texts taken from classics of world literature (of the 19th and earlier centuries) previously published by the Penguin Classics series.
(3) Four smaller sets
These sets (in which each volume featured an orange spine) reprinted short works or extracts of longer works of "classics" in the fields of
(i) biography (10 titles)
(ii) cookery (10 titles)
(iii) travel (10 titles)
(iv) children's books (30 titles).
Format: The size of each of these books was 138 x 105 mm. Each book contained between 54 and 92 pages. Many of these books contained extracts; some of them contained complete texts. Each book could be read in about an hour (the duration of a commuter trip) and was designed to give reader a taste of the classic work and its author.
Marketing: As noted above, Penguin 60s volumes were sold to the public at a very affordable 60p each. Complete sets of the Penguin 60s Classics were also available as boxed sets (all 60 volumes in a row inside an open-fronted decorated black cardboard box).
The general editors of the Penguin 60s Classics were Anthony Burgess and Christopher Bristow.
(1) The main set (often referred to as the Black Set):
The History of England by Jane Austen
Jason and the Argonauts by Apollonius of Rhodes
Lysistrata by Aristophanes
The Atheist's Mass by Honoré de Balzac
Ten Tales from the Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
Beowulf and Grendel
Buddha's Teachings
Meeting Dr Johnson by James Boswell
Haiku by Matsuo Basho
On Great Men by Thomas Carlyle
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Mina Laury by Charlotte Brontë
The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
The Jealous Extremaduran by Miguel de Cervantes
Etiquette for Renaissance Gentlemen by Baldesar Castiglione
The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad
The Galapagos Islands by Charles Darwin
The Gentle Spirit by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Betrayal of Montezuma by Bernal Díaz del Castillo
The Education of Frederick Douglas by Frederick Douglass
The First Three Circles of Hell by Dante Alighieri
The Pleasures and Pains of Opium by Thomas De Quincey
A Visitation of the Plague by Daniel Defoe
The Means and Manner of Obtaining Virtue by Benjamin Franklin
A Simple Heart by Gustave Flaubert
Reflections of the Fall of Rome by Edmund Gibbon
Gilgamesh and Enkidu
Letters from Italy by J. W. von Goethe
The Lifted Veil by George Eliot
Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau
The Lessons of the Master by Henry James
The Rage of Achilles by Homer
The Voyages of Odysseus by Homer
The Judgement and In the Penal Colony by Franz Kafka
Krishna's Dialogue on the Soul
The Kiss by Kate Chopin
The Marquise of O. by Heinrich von Kleist
Hannibal's Crossing of the Alps by Livy
The Art of War by Niccolò Machiavelli
The Death of King Arthur by Thomas Malory
Boule de Suif by Guy de Maupassant
Zarathustra's Discourses by Friedrich Nietzsche
Orpheus in the Underworld by Ovid
The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe
Phaedrus by Plato
A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud
Meditations of a Solitary Walker by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Confessions of a Sinner by Saint Augustine
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Counsels on the Spiritual Life by Thomas à Kempis
Two Viking Romances
The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
Tales of Cú Chulaid: Irish Heroic Myths
Three Sketches from a Hunter Diary by Ivan Turgenev
The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg by Mark Twain
Nero and the Burning of Rome by Tacitus
Lives of Three Renaissance Artists by Giorgio Vasari
Souls Belated by Edith Wharton
The Portrait of Mr W. H. by Oscar Wilde
Song of Myself by Walt Whitman
(2) The second set (often referred to as the Orange Set):
God's Dice by Martin Amis
The Emperor's New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Sonny's Blues by James Baldwin
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce
from Le Pigeonnier by Dirk Bogarde
Killing Lizards by William Boyd
His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood by Poppy Z Brite
Ten Italian Folktales by Italo Calvino
Summer by Albert Camus
First and Last by Truman Capote
Goldfish by Raymond Chandler
The Black Monk by Anton Chekhov
Lamb to the Slaughter by Roald Dahl
I'll Be with You in the Squeezing of a Lemon by Elizabeth David
The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor
The Dreaming Child by Karen Blixen
The Man with the Twisted Lip by Arthur Conan Doyle
Racing Classics by Dick Francis
Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis by Sigmund Freud
Prophet, Madman, Wanderer by Kahlil Gibran
Adam's Navel by Stephen Jay Gould
Five Letters from an Eastern Empire by Alasdair Gray
Under the Garden by Graham Greene
Seven Yorkshire Tales by James Herriot
Little Tales of Misogyny by Patricia Highsmith
The Haunted Dolls House by M. R. James and R. L. Stevenson
[Note: This volume contains two short stories by James and one short story by Stevenson]
Baa Baa Black Sheep by Rudyard Kipling
A Long Night at Abu Simbel by Penelope Lively
The Escape by Katherine Mansfield
Bon Voyage, Mr President by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Angel by Patrick McGrath
Bartleby by Herman Melville
Gunner Milligan, 954024 by Spike Milligan
Four Essays by Michel de Montaigne
from The Four Corners by Jan Morris
Rumpole and the Younger Generation by John Mortimer
Tales from Malgudi by R. K. Narayan
A Model by Anaïs Nin
The Genius by Frank O'Connor
Pages from a Scullion's Diary by George Orwell
Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art by Camille Paglia
A Taste of Life by Sara Paretsky
The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe
Village Christmas by Miss Read
Let Them Call It Jazz by Jean Rhys
The Snatching of Bookie Bob by Damon Runyon
The Secret Sin of Septimus Brope by Saki
Scale by Will Self
Death of a Nobody by Georges Simenon
The Portobello Road by Muriel Spark
The Pavilion on the Links by Robert Louis Stevenson
Down the Yangtze by Paul Theroux
Matilda's England by William Trevor
Ram Chander's Story by Mark Tully
Friends from Philadelphia by John Updike
Why I Live at the P. O. by Eudora Welty
Madame de Treymes by Edith Wharton
The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde
Killing the Angel in the House by Virginia Woolf
Extra volume in this set:
Teachings of Jesus: The Sermon on the Mount and Parables of the New Testament (The Holy Bible King James Version). Penguin, 1995.
Set 3 (i): Biography
The Trial of Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellmann
The War in Spain by Laurie Lee
Coming of Age by Dirk Bogarde
Childhood by Anthony Burgess
Now Remember by Vladimir Nabokov
Year One by Marianne Faithfull
Less is More Please by Barry Humphries
Florence Nightingale by Lytton Strachey
Little Me by Katharine Hepburn
Camp Cuba by Blake Morrison
Set 3 (ii): Cookery
Hot and Spicy Floyd by Keith Floyd
Fresh from the Sea by Rick Stein
More than Meets the Eye by Margaret Visser
Peperonata and Other Italian Dishes by Elizabeth David
30-Minute Suppers by Nigel Slater
Chocolate Parfait by Helge Rubinstein
Puddings by Jane Grigson
From Sophie's Table by Sophie Grigson
Ful Medames and Other Vegetarian Dishes by Claudia Roden
The LIttle Book of Big Soups by Lindsey Bareham
Set 3 (iii): Travel
Scenes from Havian Life by Jan Morris
Something of Samoa by Gavin Young
Smarkand by Colin Thubron
Slow Trains to Simla by Paul Theroux
Elephant Tales by Mark Shand
A River in Borneo by Redmond O'Hanlon
Where the Dawn Comes up the Thunder by Alexander Frater
Loose as the Wind by Patrick Leigh Fermor
From the Ngong Hills by Karen Blixen
Beyond Purdah by Mark Tully
Set 3 (iv): Children's Books
Robin Hood and his Merry Men by Roger Lancelyn Green
King Arthurs Court
Four Great Greek Myths
Classic Nonsense Verse
Mrs Pepperpot Turns Detective by Alf Proysen
The Hooligan's Shampoo by Philip Ridley
Ali Baba and The Forty Thieves by N. J. Dawood -
Three Quirky Tails by Paul Jennings
Tom Sawyer's Pirate Adventure by Mark Twain
The Night Train by Allan Ahlberg
Dead Man's Lane by Joan Aiken
The Amazing Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren
Moomintrolls and Friends by Tove Jansson
Tailes from Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
The Midnight Story by Margaret Mahy
At the River Gates by Philippa Pearce
The Clockwork Mouse by Dick King-Smith
Sherlock Holmes and the Speckled Band by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Keep It in the Family by Anne Fine
Smacking My Lips by Michael Rosen
Tom Thumb by The Brothers Grimm
The Great Time Warp Adventure by Jon Scieszka
The Great Mouse Plot by Roald Dahl
The Pied Piper of Hamelin
Classic Ghost Stories
Anne at Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery
The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen
The Dragon on the Roof by Terry Jones
Tales from The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
Lost Dog by Penelope Lively
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Author: David Paul Wagner
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