Penguin celebrates 60th with list of best books

LONDON - They have been designed to guide nervous readers through the bookshelves of literary classics, but are more likely to provoke fierce academic debate.

To celebrate its 60th anniversary, Penguin Classics has drawn up lists of the best books ever written - in categories from the best sex to best spine-tinglers.

The idea is that with 17,000 titles published every month in the UK, the public should be encouraged to choose a book worth reading.

Adam Freudenheim, Penguin Classics' publisher, said: "As a nation, we're now busier than ever before and have more demands on our time. So when we actually get time to sit down and read a book, we want it to be a good one and one worth reading."

Some suggestions are less contentious than others.

Naming Heathcliff and Cathy from Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and Lord Byron's Don Juan as best lovers is hardly to be challenged.

But given modern day reservations about the work of DH Lawrence and the average schoolboy response to Lady Chatterley's Lover, placing it among the best sex ever written could be asking for trouble.

Except, of course, that Lady Chatterley, like Homer's Odyssey, is one of the most important tomes in Penguin Classics' history.

The Odyssey was Penguin Classics first title in 1946 when the company's founder, Allen Lane, began supplying books at an affordable price - which was sixpence at the time.

Attempts to publish Lady Chatterley's Lover prompted a prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act in 1960.

When the charges were dropped, the book went on to sell more than 3 million copies.

Industry research cited by Penguin suggests that despite increased sales of books, even a heavy reader in the UK reads just four books a year.

A light reader takes in one. Yet the public buys more than £200 million ($610m) worth of books a year.

Retail sales have risen by 4.3 per cent a year on average in the past five years, but book sales have increased by 6.5 per cent annually.

When people pick up the latest release, there is no guarantee that it will be well written, said Mr Freudenheim.

"This campaign is all about changing this and helping people to choose the books that really are worth reading. To me, Penguin Classics are a foundational part of British culture. They are books that have endured," he added.

The best-of lists have been devised according to what people are already buying and the views of the company's own literary experts.

Mr Freudenheim's own favourite classic, Middlemarch by George Eliot, fails to make any of the lists.

But there are plenty of other titles to choose from, including Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (tearjerker), Dracula by Bram Stoker (spine-tingler) and The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (crimes).

Lesser-known options include Against Nature by the French writer JK Huysmans, about a wealthy aesthete living a life of pleasure.

Its rivals in the best decadence category include two Scott Fitzgeralds - The Great Gatsby and The Beautiful and the Damned - and Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh.

Other titles likely to reach a new audience through the promotion include Venus in Furs by Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch, from whose name the word masochism is derived.

He is a candidate in the best sex list.

Foreigners provide the best adultery, from Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert) to Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Pierre Choderlos de Laclos), while home grown authors are deemed to offer best laughs.

They include Stella Gibbons, Charles Dickens and Evelyn Waugh.

The promotion is accompanied by bookshelves in open spaces including Regent's Park and Soho Square, London, during August where the public will be invited to browse some of the 13,000-plus Penguin Classics titles.

- INDEPENDENT