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Does anyone remember those cheap Penguin Classics?

steffee

steffee

Active Member
Years ago, you used to be able to get a huge variety of Penguin and Wordsworth Classics for £1 or £2 maximum, but nowadays they're often even more than the £6.99 ordinary paperback price.

The quality of course, was much poorer than ordinary paperbacks, though it was okay.... but I can't seem to find them anywhere.

The Works and such cheapie book shops (do you remember when there was a lot of these, all with different books? such as BookWorld, Book Zone, Books Etc, Bookland - okay, I'm making them up now, but there used to be a lot of them) even used to have huge shelves of them and sell them off at 5 for £4. But even Waterstones and Ottakars, and that other one that went bust, sold them too.

Bring back budget classics!

Obviously this is the UK I'm talking about. :rolleyes:
 
Could this have been the "Penguin Popular Classics" series? Because I bought a pile of those a little over a year ago, for a bit under £2 per copy. I now regret that I didn't buy more, because the Norwegian webstore I got them from no longer has stock of most of the series, and the ones they do have have been raised to 5 or 6 pounds. That's not much either, of course, but it's enough to keep me from going hog-wild.

That being said, I'm reading my copy of "Moby Dick" from it now, and there have been some pretty terrible typos etc (most greviously in one sentence where one man's name was switched for another's - it was quite perplexing until I realized that a mistake had been made)
Also, the pages seem to be starting to come loose.
But aside from that! What-a-bargain! ;)
(if the answer to my initial query is "no", well... You never saw this post. *blitz*)
 
A few years ago, Walmart carried classics that were 2/$1.00 and we bought one of nearly all they had. I can't remember who the publisher was and I'm too lazy to go search the kids' rooms for their favs they stashed away. I'm ready for Wallyworld to do another promotion like that:cool:
 
abecedarian said:
A few years ago, Walmart carried classics that were 2/$1.00 and we bought one of nearly all they had. I can't remember who the publisher was and I'm too lazy to go search the kids' rooms for their favs they stashed away. I'm ready for Wallyworld to do another promotion like that:cool:
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I remember that! I still have many of them on my shelves... in fact, I don't think I got rid of one since purchasing them. Hehe. A few years ago in college I had to take a Later British Literature class and the extra book we had to purchase besides our text collection was Frankenstein. I still had my fifty cents copy from Wal-Mart so score for the bookworm and none for the overpriced university bookstore!
 
Hmm, that's strange. We still have them in our bookstore. I wonder if it's just that our wholesaler had some in stock? We sell alot of those actually!

I bought a whole bunch when I lived in UK. They used to be 79 p at W.H.Smith! :) I think it's such a great idea to publish the classics at such a low cost. We have a similar project in Sweden called En bok för alla (A book for everyone), where they publish all sorts of books, new, old, classics etc, and they usually cost around £2.
 
My local Ottakers still has some of the cheap Penguin classics, but they're mixed in with the more expensive editions with the black spines. By the look of the selection they have, they're not restocking the cheap ones, though. A pity.

Are the silver-spined penguin books just Twentieth Century classics?
 
Steffee, there's a "cheapy" bookstore in my town that still sells the Wordsworth classics. I think they're £1.50 each now though. They do seem to be harder to find than they were, but I'm not surprised. They're not going to want people to buy the classics at a quid each when you can go to Waterstone's and pay £6.99!
 
I've just seen Amazon(.co.uk) sells both versions of the classics, at £1.25 upwards. They don't have many titles, and I think you have to search by title / author, but still, that's great.
 
Reading Shade and Stewart's discussion of Penguin Classics in the Nathaniel West:Miss Lonelyhearts/Cool Million thread, I wondered what the draw to this collection could be(aside from the idea of collecting nice copies of great books!). So I googled the Penguin Classics site and just a cursory browse is mouth watering! Wow, all those great books..and me with no money or spare room...maybe its time to have a garage sale after all:p
 
i usually get everything at half price books and get things at a steal. they usually have a collection of these for really cheap. also, there is a store at our local outlet mall that sells all books for less than $5 and you would not believe what you would find. i got the complete set of beatrix potter books for my kids a few years ago for $5 (i don't know if those are penguin classics, but i know they have some there for sure). also a homeschooling store locally sells them really cheap new and used. i think you just have to hunt for the bargain places or for any place that stocks things like that. it took me a while to find all the great little secrets about book stores and which ones to go to and where to look. i am sad that a used book store in my little town went out of business (half price books just is overwhelming competition for mom and pop places).
 
It's not just the selection that's important when it comes to Penguin Classics; it's the covers: black strip for the older stuff, silver for the more modern.

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awww.penguinclassics.co.uk_static_covers_all_8_5_9780141182858H.jpg
 
I wonder if I wasn't thinking of the wrong series before..I was thinking of an orange and white collection that was not so attractive as these.
 
Oh, I still see those around. I picked up One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Master and the Margarita.
 
I think the orange ones date back to the sixties; at least the ones I see on eBay. Could just be UK though as I know the UK and Canada has silver classics, with the US only getting black ones.
 
That explains it then..I couldn't remember if the orange and white ones were Penguins or Puffins, but I remember them from used bookstores..
 
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