Penguin 60s explained

To celebrate its 60th anniversary circa 1995, Penguin Books released several boxed sets of "Penguin 60s", miniature books about sixty pages in length. The books were also sold individually.

The main set, with black spines, contained 60 "classic" works. The UK set with orange spines (/) focused on 20th century or contemporary writers and contained 60 books. A similar set of 60 orange spine books was released for the US market with 13 books in common with the UK set. Smaller, ten item sets focusing on biography/autobiography, travel and cookery were also issued. A children's set was released, consisting of 30 volumes.

Further books in the series were planned but appear to have been cancelled. Thirty Obituaries of Wisden selected by Matthew Engel was published but did not appear in any of the other sets of books. Ten orange spine books were released as a limited edition boxed set sold through Blackwell's bookshops in the UK with Stephen King's Umney's Last Case the only title appearing in the US orange spine editions. The other nine titles in the Blackwells set were unique titles that did not appear in the other sets (Surprised by Summer by David Lodge, Postcards from Summer by Peter Mayle, Lizzie Borden by Angela Carter, The Girl Who Loved Graveyards by P.D. James, Expulsion from Paradise by Howard Jacobson, Meeting Bilal by Esther Freud, The Rock of Crack as Big as the Ritz by Will Self, The Pocket Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins and Scenes from the Dwarf by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor). Another 19 titles appear to have been planned as they are listed at the back of the biography and travel editions but do not appear to have been published.

The American orange spine set and British orange spine set only had 13 books that were in common. They are:

  1. Hans Christian Andersen – The Emperor's New Clothes
  2. Anton Chekov – The Black Monk and Peasants
  3. Roald Dahl – Lamb to the Slaughter and Other Stories
  4. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – The Man with the Twisted Lip and The Adventure of the Devil's Foot
  5. Graham Greene – Under the Garden
  6. Rudyard Kipling – Baa, Baa, Black Sheep and The Gardener
  7. Gabriel García Márquez – Bon Voyage, Mr President and Other Stories
  8. Herman Melville – Bartleby and The Lightning-rod Man
  9. Michel De Montaigne – Four Essays
  10. John Mortimer – Rumpole and the Younger Generation
  11. Edgar Allan Poe – The Pit and the Pendulum and Other Stories
  12. Edith Wharton – Madame de Treymes
  13. Oscar Wilde – The Happy Prince and Other Stories

Series

Black set (60)

  1. Jane Austen – The history of England
  2. Apollonius of Rhodes – Jason and the Argonauts
  3. Aristophanes – Lysistrata
  4. Balzac – The Atheist's Mass
  5. Boccaccio – Ten Tales from the Decameron
  6. Beowulf and Grendel
  7. Buddha's Teachings
  8. James Boswell – Meeting Dr Johnson
  9. Matsuo Bashō – Haiku
  10. Thomas Carlyle – On Great Men
  11. Charlotte Perkins Gilman – The Yellow Wallpaper
  12. Charlotte Brontë – Mina Laury
  13. Cao Xueqin – Dream of the Red Chamber
  14. Miguel de Cervantes – The Jealous Extremaduran
  15. Castiglione – Etiquette for Renaissance Gentlemen
  16. Joseph Conrad – The Secret Sharer
  17. Charles Darwin – The Galapagos Islands
  18. Dostoyevsky – The Gentle Spirit
  19. Bernal Díaz del Castillo – The Betrayal of Montezuma
  20. Frederick Douglass – The Education of Frederick Douglass
  21. Dante – The First Three Circles of Hell
  22. De Quincey – The pleasures and pains of opium
  23. Daniel Defoe – A Visitation of the Plague
  24. Benjamin Franklin – The Means and Manner of Obtaining Virtue
  25. Flaubert- A Simple Heart
  26. Gibbon – Reflections of the Fall of Rome
  27. Gilgamesh and Enkidu
  28. Goethe – Letters from Italy
  29. George Eliot – The Lifted Veil
  30. Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience
  31. Henry James – The Lessons of the Master
  32. Homer – The Rage of Achilles
  33. Homer – The Voyages of Odysseus
  34. Franz Kafka – The Judgement and In the Penal Colony
  35. Krishna's Dialogue on the Soul
  36. Kate Chopin – The Kiss
  37. Heinrich von Kleist – The Marquise of O
  38. Livy – Hannibal's Crossing of the Alps
  39. Machiavelli – The Art of War
  40. Thomas Malory – The Death of King Arthur
  41. Maupassant – Boule de Suif
  42. Nietzsche – Zarathustra's Discourses
  43. Ovid – Orpheus in the Underworld
  44. Edgar Allan Poe – The Murders in the Rue Morgue
  45. Plato – Phaedrus
  46. Rimbaud – A Season in Hell
  47. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – Meditations of a Solitary Walker
  48. Saint Augustine – Confessions of a Sinner
  49. Robert Louis Stevenson – Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
  50. Thomas à Kempis – Counsels on the Spiritual Life
  51. Two Viking Romances
  52. Tolstoy – The Death of Ivan Ilyich
  53. Tales of Cú Chulainn
  54. Turgenev – Three Sketches from a Hunter Diary
  55. Mark Twain – The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg
  56. Tacitus – Nero and the Burning of Rome
  57. Vasari – Lives of Three Renaissance Artists
  58. Edith Wharton – Souls Belated
  59. Oscar Wilde – The Portrait of Mr W. H.
  60. Walt Whitman – Song of Myself

Orange set (UK titles)

  1. Martin Amis – God's Dice
  2. Hans Christian Andersen – The Emperor's New Clothes
  3. Marcus Aurelius – Meditations
  4. James Baldwin – Sonny's Blues
  5. Ambrose Bierce – An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
  6. Dirk Bogarde – from Le Pigeonnier
  7. William Boyd – Killing Lizards
  8. Poppy Z Brite – His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood
  9. Italo Calvino – Ten Italian Folktales
  10. Albert Camus – Summer
  11. Truman Capote – First and Last
  12. Raymond Chandler – Goldfish
  13. Anton Chekhov – The Black Monk
  14. Roald Dahl – Lamb to the Slaughter
  15. Elizabeth David – I'll be with you in the Squeezing of a Lemon
  16. The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor
  17. Karen Blixen – The Dreaming Child
  18. Arthur Conan Doyle – The Man with the Twisted Lip
  19. Dick Francis – Racing Classics
  20. Sigmund Freud – Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis
  21. Kahlil Gibran – Prophet, Madman, Wanderer
  22. Stephen Jay Gould – Adam's Navel
  23. Alasdair Gray – Five Letters from an Eastern Empire
  24. Graham Greene – Under the Garden
  25. James Herriot – Seven Yorkshire Tales
  26. Patricia Highsmith – Little Tales of Misogyny
  27. M. R. James and R. L. Stevenson – The Haunted Dolls House
  28. Rudyard Kipling – Baa Baa Black Sheep
  29. Penelope Lively – A Long Night at Abu Simbel
  30. Katherine Mansfield – The Escape
  31. Gabriel García Márquez – Bon Voyage, Mr President
  32. Patrick McGrath – The Angel
  33. Herman Melville – Bartleby
  34. Spike Milligan – Gunner Milligan, 954024
  35. Michel de Montaigne – Four Essays
  36. Jan Morris – from The Four Corners
  37. John Mortimer – Rumpole and the Younger Generation
  38. R. K. Narayan – Tales from Malgudi
  39. Anaïs Nin – A Model
  40. Frank O'Connor – The Genius
  41. George Orwell – Pages from a Scullion's Diary
  42. Camille Paglia – Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art
  43. Sara Paretsky – A Taste of Life
  44. Edgar Allan Poe – The Pit and the Pendulum
  45. Miss Read – Village Christmas
  46. Jean Rhys – Let Them Call It Jazz
  47. Damon Runyon – The Snatching of Bookie Bob
  48. Saki – The Secret Sin of Septimus Brope
  49. Will Self – Scale
  50. Georges Simenon – Death of a Nobody
  51. Muriel Spark – The Portobello Road
  52. Robert Louis Stevenson – The Pavilion on the Links
  53. Paul Theroux – Down the Yangtze
  54. William Trevor – Matilda's England
  55. Mark Tully – Ram Chander's Story
  56. John Updike – Friends from Philadelphia
  57. Eudora Welty – Why I Live at the P. O.
  58. Edith Wharton – Madame de Treymes
  59. Oscar Wilde – The Happy Prince
  60. Virginia Woolf – Killing the Angel in the House

Orange set (US Titles)

  1. Louisa May Alcott – An Old Fashioned Thanksgiving
  2. Hans Christian Andersen – The Emperor's New Clothes
  3. J. M. Barrie – Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens
  4. William Blake – Songs of Innocence and Experience
  5. Geoffrey Chaucer – The Wife of Bath and Other Canterbury Tales
  6. Anton Chekov – The Black Monk and Peasants
  7. Samuel Taylor Coleridge – The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Other Poems
  8. Colette – Gigi
  9. Joseph Conrad – Youth: A Narrative
  10. Roald Dahl – Lamb to the Slaughter and Other Stories
  11. Robertson Davies – A Gathering of Ghost Stories
  12. Fydor Dostoevsky – The Grand Inquisitor
  13. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – The Man with the Twisted Lip and The Adventure of the Devil's Foot
  14. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Nature
  15. Omer Englebert – The Lives of the Saints
  16. Fannie Merritt Farmer – Selections from the Original 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cookbook
  17. Edward Fitzgerald – The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
  18. Robert Frost – The Road Not Taken and Other Poems
  19. Gabriel García Márquez – Bon Voyage, Mr President and Other Stories
  20. Nikolai Gogol – The Overcoat and The Nose
  21. Graham Greene – Under the Garden
  22. Jacob And Wilhelm Grimm – Grimms' Fairy Tales
  23. Nathaniel Hawthorne – Young Goodman Brown and Other Stories
  24. O. Henry – The Gift of the Magi and Other Stories
  25. Washington Irving – Rip Van Winkle and the Legend of Sleepy Hollow
  26. Henry James – Daisy Miller: A Comedy
  27. V. S. Vernon Jones – Aesop's Fables
  28. James Joyce – The Dead
  29. Garrison Keillor – Truckstop and Other Lake Wobegon Stories
  30. Jack Kerouac – San Francisco Blues
  31. Stephen King – Umney's Last Case
  32. Rudyard Kipling – Baa, Baa, Black Sheep and The Gardener
  33. Lao Tzu – Tao Te Ching
  34. D. H. Lawrence – Love Among the Haystacks
  35. Abraham Lincoln – The Gettysburg Address and Other Speeches
  36. Jack London – To Build a Fire and Other Stories
  37. Herman Melville – Bartleby and The Lightning-rod Man
  38. A. A. Milne – Winnie-the-Pooh and his Friends
  39. Michel De Montaigne – Four Essays
  40. John Mortimer – Rumpole and the Younger Generation
  41. Thomas Paine – The Crisis
  42. Dorothy Parker – Big Blonde and other stories
  43. Edgar Allan Poe – The Pit and the Pendulum and Other Stories
  44. Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Pierce and Robert Louis Stevenson- Three Tales of Horror
  45. Franklin D. Roosevelt – Fireside Chats
  46. William Shakespeare – Sixty Sonnets
  47. John Steinbeck – The Chrysanthemums and Other Stories
  48. Peter Straub – Blue Rose
  49. Paul Theroux – The Greenest Island
  50. Henry David Thoreau – Walking
  51. John Thorn – Baseball: Our Game
  52. Leo Tolstoy – Master and Man
  53. Mark Twain – The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Stories (5 stories)
  54. H.G. Wells – The Time Machine
  55. Edith Wharton – Madame de Treymes
  56. Oscar Wilde – The Happy Prince and Other Stories
  57. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States
  58. Mother Goose – Mother Goose
  59. The Revelation of St. John the Divine: Holy Bible KJV
  60. Teachings of Jesus : Holy Bible KJV

Biography set (10)

  1. Richard Ellmann – The Trial of Oscar Wilde
  2. Laurie Lee – The War in Spain
  3. Dirk Bogarde – Coming of Age
  4. Anthony Burgess – Childhood
  5. Vladimir Nabokov – Now Remember
  6. Marianne Faithfull – Year One
  7. Barry Humphries – Less is More Please
  8. Lytton Strachey – Florence Nightingale
  9. Katharine Hepburn – Little Me
  10. Blake Morrison – Camp Cuba

Cookery set (10)

  1. Keith Floyd – Hot and Spicy Floyd
  2. Rick Stein – Fresh from the Sea
  3. Margaret Visser – More than Meets the Eye
  4. Elizabeth David – Peperonata and other Italian Dishes
  5. Nigel Slater – 30-Minute Suppers
  6. Helge Rubinstein – Chocolate Parfait
  7. Jane Grigson – Puddings
  8. Sophie Grigson – From Sophie's Table
  9. Claudia Roden – Ful Medames and other Vegetarian Dishes
  10. Lindsey Bareham – The Little Book of Big Soups

Travel set (10)

  1. Jan Morris – Scenes from Havian Life
  2. Gavin Young – Something of Samoa
  3. Colin Thubron – Smarkand
  4. Paul Theroux – Slow Trains to Simla
  5. Mark Shand – Elephant Tales
  6. Redmond O'Hanlon – A River in Borneo
  7. Alexander Frater – Where the Dawn Comes Up Like Thunder
  8. Patrick Leigh Fermor – Loose as the Wind
  9. Karen Blixen – From the Ngong Hills
  10. Mark Tully – Beyond Purdah

Children's set (30)

  1. Roger Lancelyn Green – Robin Hood and his Merry Men
  2. King Arthurs Court
  3. Four Great Greek Myths
  4. Classic Nonsense Verse
  5. Alf Proysen – Mrs Pepperpot Turns Detective
  6. Philip Ridley – The Hooligan's Shampoo
  7. N J Dawood – Ali Baba & The Forty Thieves
  8. Paul Jennings – Three Quirky Tails
  9. Mark Twain – Tom Sawyer's Pirate Adventure
  10. Allan Ahlberg – The Night Train
  11. Joan Aiken – Dead Man's Lane
  12. Astrid Lindgren – The Amazing Pippi Longstocking
  13. Tove Jansson – Moomintrolls and Friends
  14. Lewis Carroll – Tailes from Alice in Wonderland
  15. Margaret Mahy – The Midnight Story
  16. Philippa Pearce – At the river Gates
  17. Dick King-Smith – The Clockwork Mouse
  18. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Sherlock Holmes and the Speckled Band
  19. Anne Fine – Keep it in the Family
  20. Michael Rosen – Smacking my lips
  21. Brothers Grimm – Tom Thumb
  22. Jon Scieszka – The Great Time Warp Adventure
  23. Roald Dahl – The Great Mouse Plot
  24. The Pied Piper of Hamelin
  25. Classic Ghost Stories
  26. L. M. Montgomery – Anne at Green Gables
  27. Hans Christian Andersen – The Little Mermaid
  28. Terry Jones – The Dragon on the Roof
  29. Rudyard Kipling – Tales from The Jungle Book
  30. Penelope Lively – Lost Dog

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