In praise of little black numbers

The addition of 46 titles to Penguin’s Little Black Classics, from Jane Austen to the suffragettes, gives cause for renewed celebration

The people at Penguin might be overstating things when they insist that their Little Black Classics “sparked a reading revolution”. All the same, sales of these pocket-sized books, launched in February last year, are pretty gasp-inducing. Worldwide, they’ve already hit more than 2.2m copies, a figure that equates to a pile of paperbacks seven miles high.

And now, to celebrate the first Penguin Classic in 1946, they’ve added another 46 titles to the series. The selection is fantastic: someone at Penguin has inspiritingly quirky taste (I’m guessing the person in question is Simon Winder, the publishing director of Penguin Classics and the author of Germania, a very good book about Germany and his love for it). The new titles include Oroonoko by Aphra Behn, one of the first English novels; Green Tea, a ghost story by Sheridan Le Fanu; and Lady Susan, Jane Austen’s early epistolary novella. One is also dedicated, more creatively, to a sprinkling of stories and illustrations from the (sometimes scandalous) Victorian magazine The Yellow Book.

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