Once upon a time, a long time ago, I read Richmond Lattimore’s translation of the Iliad for an English class. The professor was a medievalist whose hobby was Greek literature, and it was unclear whether or not he knew Greek. Certainly, his teaching was uninspired and his observations trite.
And so I enrolled in Greek, and then in Latin, and spent hours, then years, reading the mysterious Aeschylus, the enchanting Homer, witty Catullus, brilliant Virgil, bubbly Ovid, etc., and then I had a master’s degree in classics.
I am awestruck that I made this excellent decision. I could have been another English major (I love English literature), but classical literature is gorgeous, profound, and pertinent, the poetry, plays, and philosophy of ancient civilizations that shaped western culture and literature, and still remain, in some ways, alien and unknowable. Without the universities, we would have been like Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure: Jude teaches himself Greek and Latin in a desolate village, and when he finally makes it to Hardy’s fictitious counterpart of Oxford, the professors decline even to meet him.
The humanities are in jeopardy now. One wonders if future generations will have the pleasure of reading Latin and Greek classics. I do not say this lightly. Several universities and colleges have eliminated classics programs or severely cut department budgets. The University of Chicago is winnowing its classics program and will not accept new Ph.D. students in classics in the 2026-2027 year.
According to Jeffrey E. Shulman in his article, “Cuts to the Liberal Arts Will Backfinre.” in Real Clear Education, “The University of Chicago prides itself on teaching obscure and dead languages. Although most lack their own major or minor, the Classics Department—which offers ancient Greek and Latin—counts 12 enrollees a number insignificant compared to a STEM subject like computer science, with 382 enrollees. Such numbers are typical at other elite universities: Harvard University’s 2024 graduating class included 10 classics majors and 184 computer scientists. “
The numbers were about the same in my day. But then It was a given that the value of classics and other humanities courses was beyond numbers and money.
Let’s hope some powerful people will save classics.
I recently considered enrolling in a Ph.D. program in classics. It is not, however, the optimal time to study classics.
The future of classics is in jeopardy, Many colleges have eliminated their language departments. And this week one university has recommended the cancellation of the B.A. classics major, due to low enrollment.
Classics has never been about the numbers. The numbers are always low, and have been for decades. But there is pleasure and urgency in reading classics: Greek and Roman literature, philosophy, rhetoric, and history shaped the Western canon and Western culture.
And we don’t want to burn down the Library of Alexandria, do we?
I looked at the jeopardized department’s website. Alas, it makes a case against its own department. There may be seven full-time professors- the website is such a jumble that I challenge you to sort them out – but there is a huge subgroup of affiliated faculty, with primary appointments in Biblical Studies (how many New Testament Greek classes do you need?), something called The Teaching Center, and Women’s studies.
Even I wonder why so many people are needed to teach so few students. But it may be the fault of the confused presentation wrought by the disorganized website: Other classics departments manage to separate the lists of professors and affiliate professors.
Visiting the website was a bit like reluctantly attending a retro-hippie-classicist’s rock festival, in which the late Jim Morrison would reappear to sing Catullus’s lyrics to the tune of “Light My Fire,” while Carly Simon would sing her own versions of Sappho’s lyric poetry and Pindar’s odes.
But “Where are the porta-potties?” That is always the question.
I sincerely hope, however, that the Deans, the professors, the students, the alumni, and rich donors organize to preserve the B.A. major in classics.
Mrs. Gaskell is in the canon now, but that wasn’t always the case. Years ago, on a visit to my boyfriend’s parents, I was reading her unfinished novel, Wives and Daughters, which I’d bought at a university bookstore.
And then Somebody’s Boyfriend (I can’t remember to whom he belonged) mocked Mrs. Gaskell.
“What are you reading?”
I looked over my glasses. “It’s a rediscovered classic by Mrs. Gaskell, a Victorian writer.”
“Gotta be careful of those rediscovered writers.” He thought it was a scream that anyone would read Mrs. Gaskell. “It’s a con to sell books.”
I said coolly. “It’s a great book. Want to look at it?”
He did not take up this challenge. He thought it was too, too funny.
This is the kind of interaction women used to have with men about women’s literature. The professors (mostly male then) were vague about women writers. Occasionally they’d teach Jane Austen or Emily Dickinson. It was in Women’s Studies classes that you readSusanna Rowson, Kate Chopin, Tillie Olsen, and Dorothy Richardson.
I am a great fan of the liberal arts. I graduated with honors in School of Letters (a major long ago eliminated by the university), with an emphasis on classical languages. I was so attuned to Latin that I won the Latin Prize. But it’s when you start dreaming in Latin that you realize you’ve been enchanted by Roman magic.
And then I went to graduate school to get my M.A. in classics, a mystic, if rigorous experience. I was elated by the strange sound and sense of lucid, mysterious Greek tragedy but I relate more to the exquisite Rpman poetry. In graduate school, I taught first-year Latin and Virgil as a T.A., then worked for a year as a Visiting Lecturer.
How can I explain the enchantment of the classics? In T. S. Eliot’s brilliant essay, “What Is a Classic?”, he vigorously claims Virgil’s Aeneid is the only classic in the Western canon. He believes the Latin language was at the height of maturity in the first century BCE, and Roman civilization at its apex during Augustus’s reign.
And so I was devastated to read in a newspaper that the state university is considering cutting majors in six low- enrollment programs: classical languages, Italian, Russian, women’s studies, African-American studies, and applied physics.
IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE. The university has hung on to classics for years, even when some eastern colleges eliminated it.
We don’t believe in signs in the yard, but I may be the first on the block with a SAVE THE LIBERAL ARTS sign.
To celebrate and promote the endangered classics, I am posting a link below to an essay I wrote in 2022 about Ovid’s two poems about abortion (Amores). These are, to my knowledge, the first poems about abortion.
Last week we reorganized our books. We have over 1,000 books, distributed in bookcases throughout the house. Most of them are in alphabetical order, but we now have a Jane Austen section, a Bronte section, a Conrad section, and a Dickens section. Most of these books have introductions, but not all have footnotes. (That’s why I often opt for Penguins.) I used to skip the footnotes, but now enjoy the odd mix of trivia and essential information. I feel affection for the footnote writers who educate us about barouches, carriages, and 19th-century dialect.
When I was getting used to the city, I bicycled daily to the public library to “rescue” discarded books. The main library was divesting itself of classics and out-of-print 20th-century books. Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Sir Walter Scott abounded. I also found D. E. Stevenson’s Mrs. Tim books and the Dutch mystery writer Willem Van de Wetering’s autobiographical books about Zen.
By the way, none of these were rare books. Most were stained, smudged, dog-eared, you name it. If they’d ever had value, they had none now. All I could do was save them from the dumpster.
When you have opted out of the work force, you read more than normal people do. You don’t read all the time – I don’t mean to imply that – but at least three or four hours a day. The complete works of Horace? Yes. The complete works of Edith Wharton? Of course. Monica Dickens’s One Pair of Hands and E. M. Delafield’s Provincial Lady books? Affirmative. And there was time for David Lindsay’s A Voyage toArcturus, Caroline Gordon’s short stories, andLucretius’ De Rerum Natura.
I was living, more or less, in a world of old-ish and ancient literature. “Has school started?” a man quipped one summer day when I had spread out my notebooks and reference books on a table at a coffeehouse.
But most people are oblivious of what you’re reading in public. Conducting a business on your laptop? Boring, at worst. Reading in a foreign language? A nutcase, but no one comments on it. Delving into reference books and taking notes? Possibly a teacher or lawyer. And then there are the conversationalists who talk about their intimate lives. We listen, because the acoustics make it impossible not to.
That’s where I learned that the plans for a summer bluegrass festival had gone awry. The young woman, the assistant director, had been fired for an “indiscretion,” as she called it. She Had Had An Affair with the Married Director. More than an indiscretion, I thought. People were fired all the time for less. One of my friends, a popular teacher at a private school, was fired for giving C’s to students who had rich, influential parents. But for the grace of gods… fortunately, the better and the best students signed up for my classes, so I didn’t have that dilemma.
At one time I was a loudmouth like that fired assistant director. Not only did I talk freely about my opinions of everything under the sun, I often referred to people by first and last names. “Jane Bowers said…” as if it were necessary to distinguish her from all the other Janes.
One day I was reading a Russian novel when a “frenemy” rushed over and confronted me because she and I had applied for the same job. “You ruined my chances!” she shrieked. Wait, what, why… And what business was it of hers? Neither of us got the job. But “I’m glad you didn’t get it,” a friend who worked there said. “You’re too nice.” And one of the supervisors told me privately, “The squeaky wheel gets the grease, Kat.”
All I can say is, it is a good thing I am bookish. Books have gotten me through every crisis in my life. After a hospitalization, I binge-read Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazalet Chronicles and Richard Russo’s Nobody’s Fool. I took notes on what people read on the bus. Mostly it was the newspapers, but there were also The Cat Who... mysteries, the latest Oprah book, and a book about Andy Warhol.
A friend who died in her early 40s asked me: Do you think it’s enough to have been a reader in life?
Yes, I do. I adamantly do. No one at her memorial service mentioned her love of books, and come to think of it, I have never heard anyone at a memorial service mention the love of reading.
But, believe me, she was bookish, and if she had lived, I would have found out about twice as many books.
One day, when I was cursing a document, a co-worker told me not to be a “nervous Nellie.” I was startled but I liked this woman, who popped in every morning with a cup of tea or flowers from her garden. I was feeling tense, and she tried to cheer me up. The phrase “nervous Nellie” wasn’t an insult. And she was looking out for me. During our down time, we confided about work stress. On rebellious days, we defiantly read our library books.
As soon as I left the office, I forgot everything about it. Once home, once the door was closed behind me, I exhaled all my tension. There I was, in my stocking feet, making a cup of tea and settling down with a good book. After work, I often read classics: Pindar’s Odes, Castiglione’s The Courtier, Sigrid Undset, and, whenever possible, P. G. Wodehouse.
What is the ensorcellment of good books? It is a drug with no equivalent. It is perhaps a form of enchantment. Or is it nature’s way of making us pay attention to details we do not notice? We are transported to a world of euphonious words, especially if we read aloud. And characters in novels become as real to us as our friends and frenemies. But best of all is that feeling of tranquility.
I love that feeling of calm. And I don’t imagine it. Studies show that reading books (it has to be books) can reduce stress and lower your heart rate. Another study claims that it also reduces mortality rates. And Zoe Shaw, a psychotherapist and author of A Year of Self-Care: Daily Practices and Inspiration for Caring for Yourself, said that “reading has been connected to meditation in terms of the way our brain processes our environment and our physiological state.”
The Oxford Illustrated Dickens hardback series
I’m all for meditation, of course, though I prefer a good book. Another book-related practice that calms and delights is having nice copies of favorite books. For example, The Oxford Illustrated Dickens hardcover series is perfect, as far as I’m concerned. (Used copies abound.) The books have introductions and the original illustrations by Phiz . (If you want footnotes, you need the Oxford paperback or a Penguin.) The Oxford Illustrated Dickens is the perfect size for reading in bed or on the bus: these hardcovers are only slightly larger than the Oxford World’s Classics paperbacks. My copy of Dombey and Son was reissued in 1989, but this series has gone through several printings since 1959. I absolutely love these books.
It’s not Green Mansions! But it’s the only good pic I could find of the Great Illustrated Classics.
Here’s a set of oldies you may remember: the Great Illustrated Classics. There was a rack of them at the public library, but they weren’t very attractive. Still, I like them now! I have a Great Illustrated Classics edition of W. H. Hudson’s Green Mansions, published in 1949. It looks as though it has been through a war of cocoa and dogeared pages, but I like the introduction by Edwin Way Teal. The list of books in this series (you can read it on the back cover) was immense and varied. Should I try The Last Days of Pompeii or Quo Vadis? I can’t say these are collectibles. If you find one in good condition, you’re very lucky. But there is a nostalgia factor.
Have you seen the Vintage Quarter-Bound Classics? I have not, but they look very pretty in the pictures online. The remarkable thing is that the list of classics is untraditional. Instead of Jane Austen and Middlemarch, we have Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight Children, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle. Someday I’ll meet these “in person” at a bookstore and have a better idea of wha they’re like..
And now off to calm myself with a good book. It’s a form of self-care.
I love the sound of the word angel – from the Greek angelos (messenger) – and to an extent I am a “messenger” of books.
I admit, I do not keep up with the latest books. I am bewildered by the sheer number, and yet the same few books are reviewed in all the book pages. And they mostly sound wonderful. “Ms. X is an extraordinary writer,” or “Mr. Y has achieved a lyrical intensity …”
And yet often they disappoint. The late Stephen Dixon, who wrote his books on a typewriter, attributed this decline partly to technological changes. He said he could tell the difference between books written on typewriters and computers, and thought the typewriter better suited to creativity.
The National Award-nominated Stephen Dixon wrote on a typewriter
I have not, alas, kept my New Year’s resolution to read more new books. So far I have made it through only one new novel. Kudos to Adam Haslett because I actually finished his novel, Mothers and Sons! And, no, I did not love it, but it was a good read. In my book journal I am always a softie and give five stars to everything, but poor critically-acclaimed Haslett got only a four (very good) as opposed to the coveted five (stellar).
Here’s why you might like Mothers and Sons: it is a complicated delineation of a distant relationship between a gay man, Peter, an asylum lawyer in New York, and his mother, Ann, a former Episcopalian minister who becomes a lesbian and establishes a retreat center for women.
You would think the gay thing would strengthen the bond between mother and son, but it doesn’t work that way. Peter was traumatized in his teens by killing a friend during a fight; he has never recovered, and Ann minimized the incident and forbade him to talk about it.
As a result, he is a lost soul, a silent victim. He has never come to terms with Jared’s death, and has no friends, only acquaintances and co-workers. All day he prepares to go to court on behalf of illegal immigrants, doing tedious, repetitive interviews and trying to gather information (mostly hearsay) to convince the judge to give the clients asylum.
Peter’s personal life is empty and dreary, and the prose reflects this. So much of the book consists of dull, clipped dialogue with his clients, who have tragic stories and suffer from PTSD. Haslett captures the dreariness of listening to these stories all day, but Peter’s listlessness is also boring to the reader. I just wanted to have a laugh sometimes, but there was no relief in sight.
Here’s the good news: the style does liven up after 80 pages, when Peter reluctantly takes on the case of a gay Albanian client, whose situation, though more dire, was comparable to Peter’s. Haslett relaxes, the characters become more three-dimensional, and the Albanian guy does have a laugh occasionally, which improves Peter’s bleak world view..
I disliked the sections about Ann. She is a flat character, cold and serene – but mostly cold – and though she likes listening to the women on retreat, she is basically channeling her ministerial platitudes. She is almost too involved with people: her lesbian relationship has become routine so she has fallen in love with another woman. While Peter has no involvements, she has too many.
Ann wants to see Peter, but she cannot connect with him over the phone, and doesn’t try very hard, either. He never visits. His kooky sister Liz visits both Ann and Peter, and Liz wonders loudly why neither one is interested in her. (We wonder, too.) She is simply their interpreter. I do wish there had been more about Liz. She provides some color. Stylistically, this book is gray, if I had to pick a color, but there is hope at the end.
As for books I’ve loved this month: yes, they are classics. I enjoyed The Drinking Den, the seventh volume in Zola’s 20-book cycle of naturalistic novels, Les Rougart-Macquart, in which he studied the effects of heredity and the environment on one family.
Zola’s novels are steamy pot-boilers, erupting with sex, crime, politics, and poverty. In The Drinking Den, a struggling family is shattered by alcoholism. This was a best-seller in 19th-century France, and created such a scandal that Zola’s next novel, A Love Episode, was an uncharacteristically toned-down love story. Not as popular, though.
In many ways, I find The Drinking Den terrifying. It is a hyper-realistic portrayal of the illness wrought by alcohol, the loss of jobs, the inability to meet commitments, and in this case, starvation and death. The heroine, Gervaise, works as a laundress after her lover, Lantier, deserts her, and she struggles to support their two sons. After marrying her neighbor, the hard-working construction worker, Coupeau, she opens her own laundry business. This smart couple is climbing up the ladder of class, until Coupeau has an accident, ironically caused by their daughter Nana, who calls out to him when he is working on a roof. (In a later novel, Nana, she has become a high-end prostitute.)
But it is all downhill after Lantier, Gervaise’s ex-boyfriend, returns and lures Coupeau down the road to alcoholism. This is a grim novel, and yet Zola has what I call a “noisy” voice: the writing rips along and you cannot put it down even when you’re exhausted by the fall of the family.
Does anyone have any recommendations of new books? It’s still my New Year’s resolution…
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single reader in possession of a bed, must be in want of a good book.– Anonymous ( NOT Jane Austen)
I am a proponent of reading in bed. Many are not. Some outlaw this practice. One imagines the Moms for Liberty waving torches in front of houses where they have sussed out reading in bed.
Some readers find it cozier to listen to whale sounds before bed. They say it sends them instantly to sleep. Others apply numerous creams and moisturizers to their faces and arms and legs and then don a sleeping mask. Again they fall into immediate ZZZZZZs.
I regard reading in bed as a portal to sleep. Wherever I go, I proselytize its benefits. It puts me in touch with myself and the universe so I can make the transition to sleep.
The first book I read in bed was a mystery by Patricia Moyes, which I read one afternoon while waiting to go to Christmas dinner. It had a calming effect on an exciting holiday. Later, when I lived for several months with my father, I kept nocturnal hours and stayed up late reading Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, tucked cozily in a sleeping bag on top of the bed (because what teenage bookworm ever makes the bed, right?).
As an adult I have devoted many evenings to reading in bed. I recommend getting lost in a Victorian classic, such as Trollope’s The Way We Live Now; Golden Age Detective fiction by Margery Allingham and Ellery Queen; Elizabeth Bowen’s lyrical novels; and the latest by Tessa Hadley, After the Funeral and Other Stories, many of which explore the theme of living in a hippie family. The characters and situations can be comical and poignant, but on one occasion, the hippie children are tragically resentful and unbalanced at their mother’s wedding.
Speaking of which, has anyone noticed that Tessa Hadley is never nominated for the Women’s Prize or the Booker Prize? I find that unfathomable, since she is one of the best English writers today. She has won other awards, doubtless prestigious but unknown to me. I hope her next book wins one of the big prizes.
Reading is bed is such a comfort, but over a period of weeks I put the practice on hold, because my husband objected to my reading the Poldark books in bed. He claimed my reading woke him up in the wee hours, because I was clearly so enthralled by it. (Can you hear silent enthralling?) Yet I couldn’t put the Poldark books down even for his sake, and if you’ve read Winston Graham’s well-written, dashing historical novels, you’ll know what I mean. So I took to reading Poldark in the spare room.
The prolific, multi-talented Winston Graham also wrote Marnie, which was adapted as a film by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Sean Connery and Tippi Hedren. It is a gripping movie, simmering with terror, neurosis and repressed sex. There is an eerie scene between Marnie and her mother that haunts me.
As for Poldark, I admit that I have not finished the series. Someday I’ll get back to it. I love the complex characters and the vigorous writing. It begins when the charming, smart Ross Poldark, a veteran of the Revolutionary War and the part-owner of a couple of disused mines, returns from America to Cornwall only to find that he was presumed dead, and that Elizabeth, his former fiancée, has married his cousin, Francis. Naturally, Ross is moody and upset, though later, he marries Demelza, a young woman he rescued from her violent father, and who grew up as a servant in his house, and who becomes a charming woman. But it takes a long time for Ross to properly appreciate Demelza, though she is a far more sympathetic character than the neurotic Elizabeth. Demelza is a skilled gardener, a sympathetic listener with many friends, a good mother, and capable of lying to the British soldiers to protect smugglers. The repair of the mines owned by Ross and Francis requires a glib tongue (Ross’s) to acquire money to get them into shape. The working conditions in the mines are as humane as possible, unlike the horrific practices described in Zola’s Germinal or in Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley. Still, there are accidents.
Lately I’ve reread lots of Henry James (The Ambassadors, The Spoils of Poynton), Mark Twain’s witty, inimitable novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and a couple of books from the Booker International and Women’s Prize longlists. All of these are appropriate bedtime reading.
But if you really want to go to sleep, why not try something by Dumas? Anything by Dumas! Oh, dear, I wish I loved his books, but I feel myself falling asleep at the thought of reading one.
Chalk and a blackboard. Tokens of her trade. A young woman wearing jeans and a sweaty leotard surreptitiously adjusts her bra strap while writing PARTICIPLES in capital letters on the board.
Dear Reader, that woman was I, having rushed to class from the gym. I hastily slipped my jacket over the leotard so the male students would not stare at my flat breasts, which had never previously provoked interest. I was frazzled: my watch had stopped at the gym and I’d had to race to class.
“A participle is a verbal adjective,” I said, sweating. “Take the English verb stem and add the ending, -ing: Praising, running, smiling, rushing, falling, singing…”
They took mad notes. I gave examples. “The man speaking to the audience has a lisp. Did you see the woman dancing at the rock festival? The waitress dropped a plate of spaghetti on the smirking man who pinched her butt.”
I taught them the formation of the Latin participle and we did a worksheet together.
I loved teaching Latin at the university. So help me, that was the best job I ever had. I’m looking back, decades later, and that job made me very happy. I was a Latin T.A. in graduate school and then had a one-year position as a Visiting Lecturer, teaching first- and second-year Latin classes. I was honored when two of my best first-year students (pre-med students) asked me to teach an independent study in Virgil. We were a roving independent study group: we usually settled at a table in the Student Union, or perched on couches in a cozy room with a fireplace.
In my leisure –too much leisure that year; I had energy to teach a couple of more classes– I was peripherally involved in women’s politics. I was the Volunteer Coordinator of the state chapter of NARAL (National Abortion Rights Action League). This meant that I “manned’ a trestle table in a university building, or scheduled other volunteers to do so, and called out to passers-by, “Keep abortion safe and legal!” They stopped to sign postcards that said, I’M PRO-CHOICE AND I VOTE, which were addressed to their Congressman. The feeble anti-choice crew had a trestle table across the way, but attracted few students in those days.
I was startled and depressed in 2022 when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade. Well, weren’t we all? We had worked hard against that very contingency, but I never believed it would happen in my lifetime.
That year, I also volunteered at a women’s bookstore, which, I believe, was unimaginatively called The Women’s Bookstore. Hardly anyone came in, except one of my former professors, a brilliant, eccentric man who loved science fiction and recommended C. L. Moore, Vonda McIntyre, and Joanna Russ.
But the store was usually dead. One can only perch on a stool in a bookstore so long without going mad. What was the point of a women’s bookstore that sold books neither to women nor men? We were a group of white women who read widely and intended to sell copies of Toni Morrison, Marge Piercy, Ursula K. Le Guin, Tillie Olsen and Zora Neale Hurston to our non-existent customers. I resigned out of boredom.
The only radicals I knew were a generation older than I, the energetic people who founded collectives and co-ops, small presses and underground (not alternative) papers. They discussed socialism and anarchism, formed health collectives and nonprofits (notably the publisher of Our Bodies , Ourselves), and lived in collectives where they founded women’s centers, broadcast radio shows, had their own press, and formed free schools.
I have not been that kind of radical. No, we were exhausted by our elders’ radicalism. My life’s work, and my most political work, has been keeping an underground body of classical literature alive. For years I taught Latin, but more important, I read and reread the literature of the Roman civilization that has less in common with our culture than is usually asserted. But the Latin language influenced English (60% of English words are derived from Latin), the Romance languages, and other European languages. And the Western canon is founded on the small body of Greek and Latin literature which survived general disintegration, wars, library fires (the Christians burned down the famous Alexandria Library and other libraries), and other disasters.
I also love the Greek, but I feel myself to be aligned mentally with the Romans. I imagine myself a Roman matron, one who would have supported Clodia, the powerful woman jeered at by Cicero in Pro Caelio, a woman who has seen better days but soldiers on. Because everything is unstable these days, is it not?
At the British Musum, I patted a statue of Augustus on the head. No bells went off. If for nothing else, that was worth the trip to London.
Ah, if only I hadn’t donated 600 books to the library the last time I moved! I would still have a mish-mash of cheap and slightly less cheap classics, along with slightly posher Penguins. Now my shelves are filled with elegant Penguins, Everyman’s Library Classics, Oxfords, and maverick Dovers. I have the books of a snob. And yet these are not my roots. I grew up on mass-market paperbacks.
But where are the Signets, the Washington Squares, Bantams, Dover Thrift Editions, Avons, and Fawcett? I no longer see many mass market books in bookstores: most stores sell trade paperbacks.
And yet mass market paperbacks used to be respected even in academe. My English, Drama History, and Comp lit Professors breezily assigned inexpensive paperbacks: they understood that we were on a budget, and that in lieu of footnotes we were perfectly capable of taking notes in class. Of course we also had Riverside editions, Modern Library College Editions, Nortons, and Penguins. But I did appreciate the fact that textbooks were affordable.
But let me go back to my mass-market paperback roots.
The first adult classic I bought was Jane Eyre, published by Washington Square, for 50 cents. I wrote my name proudly on the flyleaf, because writing my name made me feel part of the book. And I loved the cover, which has an illustration of Jane on the side of the book, which is appropriate, since this quietly intelligent woman does not seek to be at the center of things. And yet she is central to so many people: that is the surprise of the book.
I did not share this favorite novel with my friends. It never occurred to me, though it was my favorite book. We seldom discussed reading, except Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, which we fanatically traded around in school. But in those days Jane Eyre was particularly my own book.
The assigned edition! A bit bleak for a Penguin.
I was so attached to my Washington Square paperback that years later, when Jane Eyre was assigned for an English class, I asked the professor if I could read my own edition . “Yes, yes,” she said absent-mindedly. From then on I relied on common sense in these matters. Sometimes I bought the assigned text , sometimes if I had a copy I read my own.
Washington Square Press is still around, and it is now a part of Atria Publishing. It has taken a different direction. Atria gives the following brief history.
Since its founding in 1959, the Washington Square Press name has been synonymous with the finest in classic and contemporary fiction. As part of the Atria Publishing Group, WSP is the paperback home of some of the world’s most talented contemporary storytellers, including Fredrik Backman, Reyna Grande, Philippa Gregory, Thomas Keneally, Jess Kidd, Taylor Jenkins Reid and Jennifer Weiner, joining such WSP backlist luminaries as Pearl Buck, Carlos Castaneda, Graham Greene, Jim Harrison, bell hooks, Wally Lamb, Kate Morton, Walter Mosley, and Jodi Picoult.
Another inexpensive brand is Signet classics. Signet had an enormous influence on my reading, because the books were so accessible, for sale at every bookstore when I was growing up. At 15, I read the Signet paperback of Anna Karenina, translated by David Magarshack. The reading conditions, however, were not ideal: my father and I were staying at a poet’s house – Dad and the poet worked at the same factory – and my cot was literally under a workbench , as the poet loved to point out. Every day after school I took the bus to this dreary suburb and retired to my “space” in the basement, reading uncomfortably, longing for the davenport in my mother’s middle-class house. I didn’t fall in love with Anna Karenina till I was 20, no doubt because I was able to read it on a couch.
I have read so many Signets over the years that I don’t know where to start: Vanity Fair, Middlemarch, Far from the Madding Crowd,The Return of the Native, Tess of the D’urbervilles, Chekhov’s Major Plays, Dostoevksy’s Notes from the Underground, etc., Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, and George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss.
I loved everything by Hardy, and when I first read Tess, it seemed very modern. I read it before Roe v Wade was passed, when we were still fighting for abortion rights (as we are again), and a friend got pregnant as a teen and was shipped off to relatives in another state. None of us ever saw her again. I can only imagine the trauma of living in a redneck state, separated from her friend and the culture of our hometown, and having a baby to give away. Would my friend have liked Tess? Or would it have made her bitter? God only knows.
The Signets are still available, with slightly more modern covers. Mentor Books was Signet’s n0nfiction and poetry sibling. My husband still has his Mentor Dante, translated by John Ciardi.
Here is a brief history of Signet and Mentor Books from the website.
On February 25, 1948, Signet and Mentor Books appeared for the first time in some eighty thousand stores and newsstands throughout the United States and Canada, and soon thereafter, elsewhere around the world, under the slogan “Good Reading for the Millions.”
The Mentor titles included classics such as The Iliad and Moby Dick, whereas the Signet imprint published “new talent”—William Faulkner, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, and George Orwell, among many others.
Over time, these two publishing lines combined to form the Signet Classics imprint, which today publishes nearly 400 titles, from Greek mythology to an entire library of Shakespeare’s plays, as well as classics of the 20th century.
Bantams are an old stand-by, and this publisher used to have a solid classics list. However, the books themselves are not quite as attractive or durable as Signets. I had the above edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and I do like this cover, though I did not at the time. I also like the cover of Sister Carrie, though I could never again read that poorly-written novel.
These days Penguin Random House owns Bantam, and the brand is no longer associated with classics. Here is the bio of Bantam Books:
Since our creation in 1945 by Walter B. Pitkin, Jr., Sidney B. Kramer, and Ian and Betty Ballantine, Bantam Books has represented a spirit of adventure in storytelling matched by a bold cultural and intellectual reach. Our current fiction list has a particular focus on suspense titles, publishing some of the most talented names in mystery and thriller, including bestselling authors William Landay, Susan Elia MacNeal, Laurie R. King, and Rita Mae Brown, as well as a host of emerging stars. On the nonfiction side, Bantam is known for excellence in science, military history, and sports. We have proudly published bestselling writers such as Stephen Hawking, Daniel Coyle, Adam Makos, and James Hornfischer.
There are, or were, many more of these mass market editions: Avon, Dover Thrift Editions, and Fawcett, to name a few. But I do sense that they’ve evolved over the years from classics into other genres.
–A riff on the chorus of “Paperback Writer” (The Beatles)
When I try to calculate how many paperbacks we have, I wish that I had paid more (any) attention in math. We have hundreds of paperback classics, and some are duplicates. We have Conrad and Colette, Dickens and Dostoevsky, George Eliot and T.S. Eliot. A multitude of publishers specialize in classics, and we have a variety of editions to choose from. Here are some of my favorite publishers of classics, and a few words about them.
A variety of Penguins.
1. Penguin Classics
According to a brief precis on the back page of a Penguin, the first Penguin classic was published in 1945, E. V. Rieu’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey. Penguin stresses that classics were not widely available at the time except to students and scholars. Penguin brought affordable classics to the masses.
Penguins dominate our shelves. For one thing, they are attractive, with orange, green, or black spines, according to the era of publication, and are easy to find in bookstores. I appreciate the scholarly notes and fascinating introductions. Does any publisher have a more varied list of classics?
Penguin has branched out into a number of different classics lines in recent years. The Penguin Deluxe Classics are oversized paperbacks, with bold, original, sometimes cartoonish covers. I love the outre, slightly surreal Jane Austen covers (Jane was nothing if not humorous) and the gritty realism of the the cover of Steinbeck’s East of Eden. On the other hand, the covers of Jane Eyre and The Scarlet Letter are grotesque. But the Deluxe editions have the same notes and introductions found in the “straight” Penguins.
I also love the sturdy, attractive Penguin Clothbound Classics, with wallpaper=like cover designs by Coralie Bickford. I never enjoyed Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea until I read it in the beautiful Penguin hardcover. It is not my favorite of her books, but covers do matter! And these hardbacks too have the intros and notes from the original Penguins.
2. Oxford World’s Classics
Oxford World’s Classics has been in business for “more than 100 years,” says its website. I am very fond of Oxfords: I like their covers, and the contrast of their white covers with their rival Penguins’ dark. Penguins and Oxfords are almost interchangeable to me. Both have excellent introductions and notes, but Oxfords go one step farther, providing a Chronology that compares the events in the author’s life with the main events and books published at the same time.
The print in the Oxfords is of a comfortable size and has enough space between the lines to be easy on the eye. Over the years I have acquired three “generations” of Oxfords, the yellows, then the red-and-whites, and now the whites. To be honest, I preferred the red-and-whites. But all of them are gorgeous, so why complain? Oxford World’s Classics also has a hardcover line, with only 10 or so books. The Oxford hardcover War and Peace, translated by the Maudes and updated by a modern translator, is very nice indeed.
Vintage classics
4. Vintage Classics
The Vintage classics win my heart because they are so pretty.
Founded in the UK in 1990, Vintage features an eclectic group of authors ranging from Angela Carter to Fumiko Enchi, Irina Ratushinskaya to Nancy Mitford, Willa Cather to Charles Dickens, and W. Somerset Maugham to Ford Madox Ford. The covers have always been gorgeous, but in 2007 the red signature spine made them even more eye-catching. . Really, I adore those books. There are no notes, and only occasionally short introductions, but I can do without either.
4. University of Chicago Press.
The best translations of the Complete Greek Tragedies, edited by Richmond Lattimore and David Grene, are published by the University of Chicago. This was a huge project of Lattimore and Grene’s, who translated some of the plays themselves, but recruited other poets and classicists, among them Robert Fitzgerald, for others. The translations are close to the Greek, as close as you’re likely to get. The University of Chicago also publishes Lattimore’s beautiful translation of Homer’s Iliad.
5. Dover Publications
Founded in 1941, Dover publishes inexpensive, attractive editions of hard-to-find classics such as Anatole France’s Penguin Island, Le Fanu’s Complete Ghost Stories, and The Early Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick. They publish mainstream classics, too, but beware of the shorter Dover Thrift Classics: my copy of Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World had tiny print and no margins on the page, so I could not read it. No problem at all with the LONGER books, though, such as Dostoevksy’s Demons. Dover recently changed ownership, so perhaps someone forgot about margins. But over the years they have published a glorious variety of books, and you can still buy out-of=print Dovers online.
6. Otto Penzler Presents American Mystery Classics
I have discovered many spellbinding American Golden Age classics through Otto Penzler’s series. We hear so much about Golden Age English detective novels that we forget the American writers were also working in this era. :Among my favorites are Ellery Queen’s The Spanish Cape Mystery, Charlotte Armstrong’s The Unsuspected, H. F. Heard’s A Taste for Honey, and Stuart Palmer’s The Puzzl of the Happy Hooligan.
What are your favorite publishers of classics? Are you a Penguin person, or a groupie of a publisher I haven’t mentioned here?
