If you follow me on Instagram, it’s no secret I’m a huge fan of Penguin English Library books. While they aren’t the only books I read, they are pretty much the only ones I share on my Instagram page because the covers are just so pretty and it’s usually a book I take out and about with me.
Since discovering these books, I’m on a mission to read and collect all 126 of them. In this article, I cover what I’ve learned about the Penguin English Library so far to answer any questions you may have about the collection. And I’ve listed all of the books in the collection so you can see which ones I have, follow along my progress of aquiring all 126 and see which ones you may want to add to your shelves.
This is a long article, so I’ve made it easier with this table of contents so you can skip through the article:
Contents
- What is the Penguin English Library?
- Where can I buy a Penguin English Library book?
- What’s an original Penguin English Library book?
- How much does a Penguin English Library book cost?
- How many Penguin English Library books do you have?
- A Complete List of Penguin English Library Books
- My Tips for Purchasing Penguin English Library Books
What is the Penguin English Library?
For those not familiar, it’s a collection of 126 books published by Penguin Random House UK and beautifully designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith, who’s Instagram feed I adore! It started out with 100 classics released in 2012 to cover fiction written in English from the 18th century to the beginning of World War I. In 2018, 25 more were added to extend the collection to novels published to the end of World War II.
In October 2019, Sanditon by Jane Austen was added to coincide with the release of the TV adaptation of the unfinished novel. And a few more are set to join the collection in 2020! The Complete Novels of Jane Austen in May 2020 and The Cop and the Anthem and Other Stories by O. Henry in September 2020, Passing by Nella Larsen and Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh in October 2020.
Throughout this article I’ll typically refer to a Penguin English Library book as a PEL, as this is what we PEL collectors call it. (Also so I don’t have to type out Penguin English Library a million times!)
Where can I buy a Penguin English Library book?
If I lived in the UK, I would’ve known about this collection way sooner than I did. It’s a normal part of the classics section in UK and several European bookstores. Some places I’ve traveled to and found Penguin English Library books are all over the UK, Amsterdam, Stockholm and Copenhagen. I even picked up a copy of Middlemarch in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Strangely enough, I have never seen a Penguin English Library book in a New York City (where I’m based) or any US bookstore. (I have seen Penguin Clothbound Classics, which I’ll cover another day, but briefly, they have similar covers as PELs but are hardback.)
So for US based readers, I get a lot of questions about where to find the books…
I’ve built up my collection by buying new ones from sites like BookDepository and Amazon. But I prefer to buy used ones so I have a chance at getting an original or out of print edition. For those, I search on Abebooks and Ebay. You could also take special trips to the UK to search for these books. I’ve heard lots of great stories of what people could score in charity shops across the UK and I’ve done the same and once went to Edinburgh in search of these books (among other reasons – Edinburgh is one of my favorite cities in the world!)
Wait, what’s an Original Penguin English Library book?
I frequently talk about original Penguin English Library books when I post about them on Instagram. It’s a sort of made up term I started using. Here’s what I mean.
Of the 126 books, not all of them are still in print. I’ll cover exactly which ones are out of print below, but there are 31 of the 100 initial 2012 books that are not printed anymore.
When I first tracked down a copy of one of those out of print PELs, I immediately noticed when it arrived that it was different from the PELs that I bought new from Book Depository. They just felt different from a normal paperback book. The back and front cover had a sort of rubbery layer and felt slightly thicker than a regular PEL. Plus, the inside of the front cover had a picture of the author and the inside of the back cover listed all of the 100 PELs. And when I bought several PELs from UK booksellers on Abebooks, I noticed sometimes I would get the still in print PEL with the same out of print attributes (rubbery cover, author picture.)
So I came to the conclusion that the original 2012 books were printed with the rubbery cover and at some point, they decided not to print a few of the 100, and of the ones that they decided to continue printing, they became normal paperbacks. All of the 2018 PELs are normal paperbacks (that’s why when I buy PELs in bookstores, I tend to only purchase 2018 ones, since I’m on the hunt for original PELs only.)
I only purchase used PELs in hopes of receiving an original copy. Booksellers do not note whether it’s an original or not. I think it’s because an original PEL isn’t really a term used outside of the group of us who collect them.
Also, I have two PELs that have glossy covers and no price listed on the back. From conversations I’ve had with other collectors, I think these were the very first PELs published not for the general public.
How much does a Penguin English Library book cost?
The back of each Penguin English Library book lists a price in pounds. I’ve seen it range from £5.99 to £8.99 depending on how thick the book is. The £8.99 is a book like Vanity Fair. But I almost always don’t pay the back cover amount.
For example, in a bookstore in Stockholm, I purchased To The Lighthouse for 115 Swedish Krona which is USD $11.05. On the back cover it lists £6.99, which in USD is $8.14. So I paid a lot more for the book in Stockholm than I would’ve in the UK. That’s probably because it’s imported from the UK.
But that’s not always the case. Online on Book Depository, you can typically purchase a PEL for less than the listed price (plus free worldwide shipping!) And for out of print ones, the price varies. You can find PELs selling for $1000, which is insane. I set a personal limit to only purchase PELs under $15 and I have been lucky enough to come across a few. There will probably come a time when I will need to make an exception in order to complete the collection. But I still have several PELs I haven’t read yet so I’m limiting how many I buy at the moment.
How many Penguin English Library books do you have?
As mentioned, I’m not just collecting but also reading them along the way. So it’s going to be a long process. Here are my current numbers:
- 57 of 126 Owned
- 12 of 57 are Out of Print
- 21 of 57 are Original Editions
- 2 of 57 are Glossy
- 7 of 57 are 2018 PELs
- 42 of 57 I’ve read
The goal is to own all 126 and to make it even more interesting, to have all of them be original editions.
Will you sell one of your Penguin English Library books to me?
Sure. I sold one of my out of print Charles Dickens ones before. Leave me a comment on one of my Instagram posts.
Which Penguin English Library books are still in print?
I’ve marked the ones that are out of print in the list below. So you’ll know which ones are out of print and still in print. This is my way of also tracking my collection.
Generally, Charles Dickens out of print and Thomas Hardy out of print copies are hardest to find. When one is listed on sites like Abebooks, the prices are usually very high. But you may be lucky at times!
So here we go…
A Complete List of Penguin English Library Books
Some links found in this post are affiliate links, meaning we may receive a commission if you decide to make a purchase, at no additional cost to you.
I take my books out wherever I go. So these photos of the books are from places I’ve been to all over the world and mostly in cafes in New York City.
I’ve listed the title of each book (in alphabetical order), the author, a little back cover summary (taken from the back cover or from Penguin UK), whether it’s out of print or still in print, the ISBN so you can easily search for it online, where you can potentially purchase it (for some, you may just need to sign up to be on an email alert list) and where I purchased my copy so you can get an idea of where you can find yours too.
Images that are not mine were taken from Penguin UK and will be replaced once I get a copy of my own.
The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb and Other Cases
- Author: Arthur Conan Doyle
- Summary: As usual with the Sherlock Holmes stories it is very hard to say which are the best – but there are many stories here which would get the vote – ranging from The Boscombe Valley Mystery to the wonderful Adventure of Silver Blaze, from the Adventure of the Norwood Builder to A Case of Identity, but above to the uniquely strange and macabre Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141395500
The Adventure of the Six Napoleons and Other Cases
- Author: Arthur Conan Doyle
- Summary: Many readers would claim that The Adventure of the Copper Beeches or The Man with the Twisted Lip was their favourite Sherlock Holmes story – but then that would be doing an injustice to The Adventure of the Yellow Face and The Problem of Thor Bridge. It is just as well that in the end we do not have to choose – as if we did then there would be no doubt it should be The Adventure of the Six Napoleons.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141395548
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- Author: Mark Twain
- Summary: The original Great American Novel, an incomparable adventure story and a classic of anarchic humour, Twain’s masterpiece sees Huckleberry Finn and Jim the slave escape their difficult lives by fleeing down the Mississippi on a raft. There, they find steamships, feuding families, an unlikely Duke and King and vital lessons about the world in which they live. With its unforgettable cast of characters, Hemingway called this ‘the best book we’ve ever had’.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199009
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
- Author: Lewis Carroll
- Summary: ‘I had sent my heroine straight down a rabbit-hole … without the least idea what was to happen afterwards,’ wrote Lewis Carroll, describing how Alice was conjured up one ‘golden afternoon’ in 1862 to entertain his child-friend Alice Liddell. His dream worlds of nonsensical Wonderland and the back-to-front Looking Glass kingdom depict order turned upside-down: a baby turns into a pig, time is abandoned at a disorderly tea-party and a chaotic game of chess makes a seven-year-old girl a Queen. But amongst the anarchic humour and sparkling word play, puzzles and riddles, are poignant moments of nostalgia for lost childhood.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199689
Barchester Towers
- Author: Anthony Trollope
- Summary: Trollope’s comic masterpiece of plotting and backstabbing opens as the Bishop of Barchester lies on his deathbed. Soon a pitched battle breaks out over who will take power, involving, among others, the zealous reformer Dr Proudie, his fiendish wife and the unctuous schemer Obadiah Slope. Barchester Towers is one of the best-loved novels in Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire series, which captured nineteenth-century provincial England with wit, worldly wisdom and an unparalleled gift for characterization. The second book in the Chronicles of Barsetshire.
- Out of Print? Yes
- ISBN: 9780141199115
- Where I got mine from: It’s not very rare so got an original edition easily from Abebooks
- Where to Purchase:
Barnaby Rudge
- Author: Charles Dickens
- Summary: Dicken’s first historical novel is filled with violence, looting and the terrible deaths of the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots that swept London in 1780. Barnaby Rudge tells the story of Barnaby, a simple boy caught up in the riots, and the friends and family who are themselves affected by the strange events in Barnaby’s life, including kind-hearted locksmith Gabriel Varden, dim-witted and egotistical landlord John Willett and the brilliantly villainous Sir John Chester. This is an unforgettable novel of conspiracy, blackmail, abduction and Gothic melodrama.
- Out of Print? Yes
- ISBN: 9780141199696
- Where I got mine from: Not always available, I got mine from Abebooks. You’ll probably need to set an alert.
- Where to Purchase:
Bleak House
A Christmas Carol
- Author: Charles Dickens
- Summary: With a Christmas Carol Charles Dickens created a modern fairy tale and shaped our ideas of Christmas. The tale of the solitary miser Ebenezer Scrooge, who is taught the true meaning of the season by a series of ghostly visitors and given a second chance, was conjured up by Dickens during one of his London night walks, who ‘wept and laughed’ as he composed it. Taken to readers; hearts for its humour, compassion and message of redemption, it remains his best-loved book.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141389479
- Where I got mine from: Not an original version. I got mine new from Book Depository.
- Where to Purchase:
- Book Depository
- Abebooks (potentially score an original!)
The Confidence-Man and Billy Budd, Sailor
- Author: Herman Melville
- Summary: In The Confidence-Man, Melville’s unnerving and hallucinatory satire on the American dream, a slippery trickster and master of disguise comes to swindle his fellow passengers – who themselves may also be con-men – aboard a Mississippi steamboat. Billy Budd, Sailor, published after Melville’s death in 1891, is a gripping allegory of good and evil, as an innocent man, pressed into service on a British man-of-war, is falsely accused of mutiny. Both these late works are animated with the dark genius of the greatest of American writers.
- Out of Print? Yes
- ISBN: 9780141199306
- Where to Purchase:
- It seems to available across Abebooks, Ebay and Amazon at varying prices. Lowest prices for this title tend to be on Abebooks.
Cranford
- Author: Elizabeth Gaskell
- Summary: Cranford is an affectionate and often moving portrait of genteel poverty and intertwined lives in a nineteeth-century village. One of Elizabeth Gaskell’s most beloved works, it centres on a community dominated by women and governed by old-fashioned ways. The formidable Miss Deborah Jenkyns and the kindly Miss Matty’s days revolve around card games, tea, thriftiness and an endless appetite for scandal, until change comes into their world – whether it is the modern ideas of Captain Brown, a bank collapse, rumours of burglars or an unexpected reappearance from the past.
- Out of Print? Yes
- ISBN: 9780141199429
- Where I got mine from: Abebooks (a glossy version so I’m going to replace it!). There’s usually a few used copies available.
- Where to Purchase:
Daisy Miller and The Turn of the Screw
- Author: Henry James
- Summary: This edition contains two of Henry James’s most popular short works. Travelling in Europe with her family, Daisy Miller, an exquisitely beautiful young American woman, presents her fellow-countryman Winterbourne with a dilemma he cannot resolve. Is she deliberately flouting social convention in the outspoken way she talks and acts, or is she simply ignorant of those conventions? In Daisy Miller Henry James created his first great portrait of the enigmatic and dangerously independent American woman, a figure who would come to dominate his later masterpieces. Oscar Wilde called James’s chilling The Turn of the Screw ‘a most wonderful, lurid poisonous little tale’. It tells of a young governess sent to a country house to take charge of two orphans, Miles and Flora. Unsettled by a sense of intense evil within the houses, she soon becomes obsessed with the belief that malevolent forces are stalking the children in her care.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199757
Daniel Deronda
- Author: George Eliot
- Summary: George Eliot’s last, most controversial novel opens as the spoiled Gwendolen Harleth, poised at a roulette table about to throw away a small fortune, captivates Daniel Deronda. As their lives become intertwined, they are also transformed by suffering, misfortune, revelations and Daniel’s fascination with the Jewish singer Mirah.
- Out of Print? Yes
- ISBN: 9780141199245
- Where I got mine from: Abebooks, but when I was searching for it, I also saw several copies available on Amazon.
- Where to Purchase:
David Copperfield
- Author: Charles Dickens
- Summary: Dickens’s epic, exuberant novel is one of the greatest coming-of-age stories in literature. It chronicles David Copperfield’s extraordinary journey through life, as he encounters villains, saviours, eccentrics and grotesques, including the wicked Mr Murdstone, stout-hearted Pegotty, formidable Betsey Trotwood, impecunious Micawber and odious Uriah Heep.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199160
- Where I got mine from: Abebooks, for a used one and scored an original edition even though it’s still in print.
- Where to Purchase:
- Abebooks
- Book Depository (for new only)
- Amazon
Doctor Thorne
- Author: Anthony Trollope
- Summary: Doctor Throne, considered by Trollope to be the best of his works, is a telling examination of the relationship between money and morality.It recounts the story of the son of a bankrupt landowner, Frank Gresham, who is intent on marrying his beloved Mary Thorne despite her illegitimacy and apparent poverty. Frank’s ambitious mother and haughty aunt are set against the match, however, and push him to make a good marriage to a wealthy heiress. Only Mary’s loving uncle, Doctor Thorne, knows of the fortune she is about to inherit – but believes she should be accepted on her own terms. This is the third book in the Chronicles of Barsetshire.
- Out of Print? Yes
- ISBN: 9780141199474
- Where I got mine from: I got mine from Amazon, there’s occasionally a few used copies available.
- Where to Purchase:
Dombey and Son
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
- Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
- Summary: Published as a ‘shilling shocker’ in 1886, Robert Louis Stevenson’s dark psychological fantasy gave birth to the popular idea of the split personality. Set in a hellish, fog-bound London, the story of outwardly respectable Dr Jekyll, who unleashes his deepest cruelties and most murderous instincts when he is transformed into sinister Edward Hyde, is a Gothic masterpiece and a chilling exploration of humanity’s basest capacity for evil. This edition also includes Stevenson’s sinister story ‘The Bottle Imp’.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141389509
- Where I got mine from: Not an original version, I got mine new from one of my favorite bookstores in Edinburgh, Golden Hare Books.
- Where to Purchase:
Dracula
- Author: Bram Stoker
- Summary: A chilling masterpiece of the horror genre, Dracula illuminates the dark corners of Victorian sexuality. When Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to advise Count Dracula on a London home, he makes a horrifying discovery. Soon afterwards, a number of disturbing incidents unfolds in England: an unmanned ship is wrecked at Whitby; strange puncture marks appear on a young woman’s neck; and the inmate of a lunatic asylum raves about the arrival of his ‘Master’, while a determined group of adversaries prepares to face the terrifying count.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199337
- Where I got mine from: I scored an original version when I purchased it through Abebooks.
- Where to Purchase:
Dubliners
- Author: James Joyce
- Summary: From a child grappling with the death of a fallen priest, to a young woman’s dilemma over whether to elope to Argentina with her lover, to the dance party at which a man discovers just how little he really knows about his wife, these fifteen stories bring the gritty realism of existence in Joyce’s native Dublin to life. With Dubliners, James Joyce reinvented the art of fiction, using a scrupulous, deadpan realism to convey truths that were at once blasphemous and sacramental.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199627
- Where to Purchase:
Emma
- Author: Jane Austen
- Summary: Jane Austen’s sparkling and flawless comic masterpiece is the story of Emma Woodhouse: rich, charming, spoilt, obsessed with matchmaking and blind to everyone’s faults — including her own. Although Austen described Emma as a character ‘whom no one but myself will much like’, her wit and her gradual self-realization make her one of the author’s most remarkable, believably imperfect heroines.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199528
- Where I got mine from: Still in print but I wanted to get an original edition, so I got mine used from Abebooks (it came in perfect condition but was a regular paperback.)
- Where to Purchase:
Ethan Frome
- Author: Edith Wharton
- Summary: Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a bearable existence with his difficult, suspicious and hypochondriac wife, Zeena. But when Zeena’s vivacious cousin enters their household as a ‘hired girl’, Ethan finds himself obsessed with her and with the possibilities for happiness she comes to represent. In one of American fiction’s finest and most intense narratives, Edith Wharton moves this ill-starred trio towards their tragic destinies.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141389400
- Where to Purchase:
Evelina
- Author: Fanny Burney
- Summary: In this comic and sharply incisive satire of excess and affectations, beautiful young Evelina falls victim to the rakish advances of Sir Clement Willoughby on her entrance to the world of fashionable London. Colliding with the manners and customs of a society she doesn’t understand, she finds herself without hope that she should ever deserve the attention of the man she loves. Frances Burney’s first novel brilliantly sends up eighteenth-century society – and its opinions of women – while enticingly depicting its delights.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141198866
- Where to Purchase:
Far from the Madding Crowd
- Author: Thomas Hardy
- Summary: Hardy’s powerful novel of swift sexual passion and slow-burning loyalty centres on Batsheba Everdene, a proud working woman whose life is complicated by three different men – respectable farmer Boldwood, seductive Sergeant Troy and devoted Gabriel – making her the object of scandal and betrayal. Vividly portraying the superstitions and traditions of a small rural Community, Far from the Madding Crowd shows the precarious position of a woman in a man’s world.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141198934
- Where I got mine from: Got mine new from Book Depository.
- Where to Purchase:
The Five Orange Pips and Other Cases
- Author: Arthur Conan Doyle
- Summary: Witty and fiendishly clever, these tales of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson see the duo solving mysteries in London’s foggy backstreets and behind the walls of country houses. In some of Conan Doyle’s most famous and devilishly difficult problems, they face locked rooms, strange letters, separated twins, and beautiful, brilliant Irene Adler.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199719
- Where I got mine from: When I went book hunting in Edinburg, I found this copy at an Oxfam charity shop. Interestingly, the back says Promotional copy – not for resale.
- Where to Purchase:
Framley Parsonage
- Author: Anthony Trollope
- Summary: Mark Robarts is a clergyman with ambitions beyond his small country parish of Framley. In a naive attempt to mix in influential circles, he agrees to guarantee a bill for a large sum of money for the disreputable local Member of Parliament, while being helped in his career in the Church by the same hand. But the unscrupulous politician reneges on his financial obligations, and Mark must face the consequences this debt may bring to his family.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199764
- Where to Purchase:
- Abebooks – currently reading this series, waiting to add to my collection after I’ve read the ones I have already
- Amazon
- Book Depository
Frankenstein
- Author: Mary Shelley
- Summary: A twisted, upside-down creation myth, Mary Shelley’s chilling Gothic tale lays bare the dark side of science, and the horror within us all. It tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, who plunders graveyards to create a new being from the bodies of the dead – but whose botched creature causes nothing but murder and destruction. Written after a nightmare when its author was only eighteen, Frankenstein gave birth to the modern science fiction novel.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141198965
- Where I got mine from: I won a copy of this during one of my favorite bookstagram friends, @avictoriansoul‘s giveaway.
- Where to Purchase:
Great Expectations
- Author: Charles Dickens
- Summary: Great Expectations, Dickens’s funny, frightening and tender portrayal of the orphan Pip’s journey of self-discovery, is one of his best-loved works. Showing how a young man’s life is transformed by a mysterious series of events – an encounter with an escaped prisoner; a visit to a black-hearted old woman and a beautiful girl; a fortune from a secret donor – Dickens’s late novel is a masterpiece of psychological and moral truth, and Pip among his greatest creations.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141198897
- Where to Purchase:
Gulliver’s Travels
- Author: Jonathan Swift
- Summary: A savage and hilarious satire, Gulliver’s Travels sees Lemuel Gulliver shipwrecked and adrift, subject to bizarre and unnerving encounters with, among others, quarrelling Lilliputians, philosophizing horses and the brutish Yahoo tribe, that change his view of humanity – and himself – for ever. Swift’s classic of 1726 portrays mankind in a distorted hall of mirrors as a diminished, magnified and finally bestial species, presenting us with a comical yet uncompromising reflection of ourselves.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141198989
- Where to Purchase:
Hard Times
- Author: Charles Dickens
- Summary: Coketown is dominated by the figure of Mr Thomas Gradgrind, school owner and model of Utilitarian success. Feeding both his pupils and his family with facts, he bans fancy and wonder from young minds. As a consequence his obedient daughter Louisa marries the loveless businessman and ‘bully of humility’ Mr Bounderby, and his son Tom rebels to become embroiled in gambling and robbery. And, as their fortunes cross with those of free-spirited circus girl Sissy Jupe and victimised weaver Stephen Blackpool, Gradgrind is eventually forced to recognise the value of the human heart in an age of materialism and machinery.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199566
- Where to Purchase:
Heart of Darkness
- Author: Joseph Conrad
- Summary: Marlow, a seaman, tells of a journey up the Congo. His goal is the troubled European and ivory trader Kurtz. Worshipped and feared by invaders as well as natives, Kurtz has become a godlike figure, his presence pervading the jungle like a thick, obscuring mist. As his boat labours further upstream, closer and closer to Kurtz’s extraordinary and terrible domain, so Marlow finds his faith in himself and civilization crumbling. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness has been considered the most important indictment of the evils of imperialism written to date.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199788
- Where to Purchase:
The Hound of the Baskervilles
- Author: Arthur Conan Doyle
- Summary: The terrible spectacle of the beast, the fog of the moor, the discovery of a body: this classic horror story pits detective against dog, rationalism against the supernatural, good against evil. When Sir Charles Baskerville is found dead on the wild Devon moorland with the footprints of a giant hound nearby, the blame is placed on a family curse. It is left to Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson to solve the mystery of the legend of the phantom hound before Sir Charles’ heir comes to an equally gruesome end. The Hound of the Baskervilles gripped readers when it was first serialised and has continued to hold its place in the popular imagination.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199177
- Where to Purchase:
The House of Mirth
- Author: Edith Wharton
- Summary: A searing, shocking tale of women as consumer items in a man’s world, The House of Mirth sees Lily Bart, beautiful and charming, living among the wealthy families of New York City but reluctant to finally commit herself to a husband. In her search for freedom and the happiness she feels she deserves, Lily is ultimately ruined by scandal. Edith Wharton’s shattering novel created controversy on its publication in 1905 with its scathing portrayal of the world’s wealthy and the prison that marriage can become.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199023
- Where I got mine from: I got mine new from Book Depository, not an original edition.
- Where to Purchase:
Howards End
- Author: E.M. Forster
- Summary: ‘Only connect’ is the idea at the heart of this book, a heartbreaking and provocative tale of three families at the beginning of the twentieth century: the rich Wilcoxes, the gentle, idealistic Schlegels and the lower-middle-class Basts. As the Schlegel sisters try desperately to help the Basts and educate the close-minded Wilcoxes, the families are drawn together in love, lies and death. Frequently cited as E. M. Foster’s finest work, Howards End brilliantly explores class warfare, conflict and the English character.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199405
- Where I got mine from: My copy is new from Book Depository, regular paperback.
- Where to Purchase:
Humphry Clinker
- Author: Tobias Smollett
- Summary: Smollett’s savage, boisterously funny lambasting of eighteenth-century British society charts the unfortunate journey of the gout-ridden and irascible squire Matthew Bramble across Britain, who finds himself everywhere surrounded by decadents, pimps, con-men, raucousness and degeneracy – until the arrival of the trusty manservant Humphry Clinker promises to improve his fortunes. Populated with unforgettable grotesques and written with a relish for earthy humor and wordplay, and a ferocious pessimism, Humphry Clinker is Smollett’s masterpiece.
- Out of Print? Yes
- ISBN: 9780141199320
- Where I got mine from: I was surprised to find this original copy new at Waterstones in Edinburgh. It’s the only time I’ve seen an original copy at a store.
- Where to Purchase:
The Invisible Man
- Author: H.G. Wells
- Summary: With his face swaddled in bandages, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses and his hands covered even indoors, Griffin – the new guest at The Coach and Horses – is at first assumed to be a shy accident-victim. But the true reason for his disguise is far more chilling: he has developed a process that has made him invisible, and is locked in a struggle to discover the antidote. Forced from the village, and driven to murder, he seeks the aid of an old friend, Kemp. The horror of his fate has affected his mind, however – and when Kemp refuse to help, he resolves to wreak his revenge.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141389516
- Where to Purchase:
The Island of Doctor Moreau
- Author: H.G. Wells
- Summary: Adrift in a dinghy, Edward Prendick, the single survivor from the good ship Lady Vain, is rescued by a vessel carrying a profoundly unusual cargo – a menagerie of savage animals. Tended to recovery by their keeper Montgomery, who gives him dark medicine that tastes of blood, Prendick soon finds himself stranded upon an uncharted island in the Pacific with his rescuer and the beasts. Here, he meets Montgomery’s master, the sinister Dr. Moreau – a brilliant scientist whose notorious experiments in vivisection have caused him to abandon the civilised world. It soon becomes clear he has been developing these experiments – with truly horrific results.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141389394
- Where to Purchase:
Ivanhoe
- Author: Sir Walter Scott
- Summary: Set in a highly romanticizes Medieval world of tournaments, adventure and chivalry, Ivanhoe is credited with introducing the ninteenth-century historical fiction genre, as well as with creating the modern idea of Robin Hood and his merry men. Banished from England, Ivanhoe joins the Crusade to the Holy Land in the service of Richard the Lion Heart. He determines to return and be reunited with the beautiful Lady Rowena, but instead is drawn into a dangerous power struggle between Richard and his scheming brother John.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199139
- Where I got mine from: Not an original version. I got mine new from Book Depository.
- Where to Purchase:
Jane Eyre
- Author: Charlotte Bronte
- Summary: Passionate, poetic and revolutionary, Jane Eyre is a novel of naked emotional power. Its story of a defiant, fiercely intelligent woman who refuses to accept her appointed place in society – and instead finds love on her own terms – has become famous as one of the greatest romances ever written, but it is also a brooding Gothic mystery, a profound depiction of character and a transformative work of the imagination.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141198859
- Where I got mine from: This was one of the first three PELs I purchased. I didn’t know about the world of out of print and Abebooks so I got this one from Barnes and Nobles.
- Where to Purchase:
Joseph Andrews
- Author: Henry Fielding
- Summary: Henry Fielding’s riotous tale of innocents in a corrupt world was one of the earliest English novels, blending bawdy slapstick, philosophical musing and pointed social satire to create a work of moral complexity and generous, life-affirming humanity. Published in 1742, it tells the story of the chaste servant Joseph Andrews who, after being sacked for spurning the advances of the lascivious Lady Booby, takes to the road, accompanied by his beloved Fanny Goodwill and the absent-minded, much put-upon Parson Adams. There they encounter robbers, tricksters, mishaps and strange twists of fortune, in a series of adventures filled with exuberant comedy. This is an unforgettable novel of conspiracy, blackmail, abduction and Gothic melodrama.
- Out of Print? Yes
- ISBN: 9780141199382
- Where I got mine from: I got an original edition from Abebooks. You can find these for a reasonable price often on Amazon and Abebooks.
- Where to Purchase:
Jude the Obscure
- Author: Thomas Hardy
- Out of Print? Yes
- ISBN: 9780141199832
- Where to Purchase:
- This is one of the harder out of print PELs to find. I’ve seen this one list on Abebooks for $1000.
- Abebooks – get put on the email alert list
Kim
- Author: Rudyard Kipling
- Summary: A vivid, beguiling coming-of-age story chronicling the quest of an adolescent boy and an old ascetic priest, Kim is Kipling’s masterpiece. Kim was born and raised in India and plays with the slum children on the streets, but he is white, a sahib, and wants to play the Great Game of Imperialism, while his companion, a priest, seeks redemption from the Wheel of Life. Kim celebrates their friendship and their journeys in a beautiful, exotic but often hostile environment.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199979
- Where I got mine from: I got an original edition from Abebooks. Mine is a used library book from Cornwall.
- Where to Purchase:
Lady Audley’s Secret
- Author: Mary Elizabeth Braddon
- Summary: In this outlandish, outrageous triumph of scandal fiction, a new Lady Audley arrives at the manor: young, beautiful – and very mysterious. Why does she behave so strangely? What, exactly, is the dark secret this seductive outsider carries with her? A huge success in the nineteenth century, the book’s anti-heroine – with her good looks and hidden past – embodied perfectly the concerns of the Victorian age with morality and madness.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141198842
- Where to Purchase:
The Last Chronicle of Barset
- Author: Anthony Trollope
- Out of Print? Yes
- ISBN: 9780141199863
- Where to Purchase:
- I’ve been looking for a copy of this one to complete my Trollope collection through Abebooks.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
- Author: Laurence Sterne
- Summary: Laurence Sterne’s great masterpiece of bawdy humour and rich satire defies any attempt to categorize it. Part novel, part digression, its gloriously disordered narrative interweaves the birth and life of the unfortunate ‘hero’ Tristram Shandy, the eccentric philosophy of his father Walter, the amours and military obsessions of Uncle Toby, and a host of other characters, including Dr Slop, Corporal Trim and the parson Yorick. A joyful celebration of the endless possibilities of the art of fiction, Tristram Shandy is also a wry demonstration of its limitations.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199993
- Where to Purchase:
Little Dorrit
- Author: Charles Dickens
- Summary: A masterly evocation of the state and psychology of imprisonment, Little Dorrit is one of the supreme works of Dicken’s maturity. When Arthur Clennam returns to England after many years abroad, he takes a kindly interest in Amy Dorrit, his mother’s seamstress, and in the affairs of Amy’s father, a man of shabby grandeur, long imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea. As Arthur discovers, the dark shadow of the prison stretches far beyond its walls to affect many lives, from Mr Panks, the reluctant rent-collector of Bleeding Heart Yard, to Merdle, an unscrupulous financier.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199375
- Where I got mine from: I got a new edition from Book Depository.
- Where to Purchase:
Lord Jim
The Man Who Was Thursday
- Author: G.K. Chesterton
- Summary: In this strange, haunting novel of anarchists and undercover policemen, Gabriel Syme is sent by Scotland Yard to infiltrate the Central Anarchist Council, and soon finds himself voted to the position of ‘Thursday’. As Syme digs deeper, his discoveries about the anarchists and their plans lead to a desperate chase across Europe. But he has still to face the greatest terror that the Council has: the leader, Sunday…G.K. Chesterton’s exploration of cultural pessimism and religious conviction mixes nightmarish paranoia, parable and political humour, and has been described as the best spy book ever written.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199771
- Where I got mine from: I won my copy from a bookstagram friend, @lifebyesther. Thanks Esther!
- Where to Purchase:
Mansfield Park
- Author: Jane Austen
- Summary: One of Jane Austen’s most profound works, Mansfield Park is a subtle, moving examination of the contrast between superficial charm and true integrity. It tells the story of shy, vulnerable Fanny Price, brought up by rich relations at Mansfield Park with only her cousin Edmund as an ally. When a glamorous couple, Mary Crawford and her brother Henry, arrive from London, their charisma and reckless taste for flirtation dazzle everyone except Fanny, putting her strength of character to its greatest test.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199870
- Where I got mine from: Not an original version. I got mine new from Book Depository.
- Where to Purchase:
Martin Chuzzlewit
- Author: Charles Dickens
- Out of Print? Yes
- ISBN: 9780141198903
- Where to Purchase: Another of the harder out of print PELs to find, I check Abebooks frequently for a copy.
Mary Barton
- Author: Elizabeth Gaskell
- Summary: Mary Barton is a powerful, angry story of personal tragedy and social injustice. Its heroine Mary, the daughter of a disillusioned trade unionist, rejects her working-class lover Jem in the hope of marrying the mill owner’s son Henry Carson and making a better life. But when Henry is shot and Jem becomes the main suspect, she finds hersself painfully torn between the two men. Elizabeth Gaskell’s pioneering 1848 novel vividly dramatized the ‘hungry forties’, and made public the great division between rich and poor.
- Out of Print? Yes
- ISBN: 9780141199726
- Where I got mine from: This was my first original PEL. I got it on Abebooks to complete my Elizabeth Gaskell collection.
- Where to Purchase:
The Mayor of Casterbridge
- Author: Thomas Hardy
- Summary: The moving, humane tragedy of a deeply flawed and self-destructive man, The Mayor of Casterbrige is the story of Michael Henchard, who sells his wife and baby daughter at a country fair in a fit of drunken anger. Over the following years he establishes himself as a respected pillar of the community of Casterbridge, but cannot escape his shameful past – or himself. Subtitled ‘The Life and Death of a Man of Character’, Hardy’s intense drama, tragically played out against the rituals of a close-knit Wessex town, is one of his greatest works.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199597
- Where I got mine from: I got an original edition from Abebooks. Interestingly, I’ve seen this around bookstagram with a white cover.
- Where to Purchase:
Melmoth the Wanderer
- Author: Charles Robert Maturin
- Summary: This violent, profound, baroque and blackly humorous novel is the story of Melmoth, who has sold his soul in exchange for immortality in a satanic bargain, and now preys on the helpless in their darkest moments, offering to ease their suffering if they will take his place and release him from his centuries of tortured wanderings. Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) blended Gothic fiction and psychological realism to create a work of hallucinatory power.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780241366547
- Where to Purchase:
Middlemarch
- Author: George Eliot
- Summary: Middlemarch is a moving story of men and women longing to do the right thing, but making bad decisions. Among them is Dorothea Brooke, who wants to improve the world but finds her idealism crushed by her unhappy marriage to the aged scholar Casaubon, and Dr Lydgate, whose shallow, spendthrift wife threatens his dreams of medical progress. Describe by Virginia Woolf as ‘one of the few English novels written for grown-up people’, Middlemarch’s panoramic sweep ranges over the whole of human existence – art, faith, science, politics and love – yet at its heart are real, flawed people searching for contentment.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199795
- Where I got mine from: I found a regular paperback copy from a bookstore in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia.
- Where to Purchase:
The Mill on the Floss
- Author: George Eliot
- Summary: Tragic and moving, The Mill on the Floss is a novel of grand passions and tormented lives. As the rebellious Maggie’s fiery spirit and imaginative nature bring her into bitter conflict with her narrow provincial family, most painfully with her beloved brother Tom, their fates are played out on an epic scale. George Eliot drew on her own frustrated rural upbringing to create one of the great novels of childhood, and one of literature’s most unforgettable heroines.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141198910
- Where to Purchase:
Moby-Dick
- Author: Herman Melville
- Summary: Moby-Dick is one of the most expansive feats of imagination in the whole of literature: the mad, raging, Shakespearean tale of Captain Ahab’s insane quest to kill a giant white whale that has taken his leg, and upon which he has sworn vengeance, at any cost. A creation unlike any other, this is an epic story of fatal monomania and the deepest dreams and obsessions of mankind.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141198958
- Where to Purchase:
The Monk
The Moonstone
- Author: Wilkie Collins
- Summary: When Rachel Verinder’s birthday present – the Moonstone, a large Indian diamond – is stolen at her party, suspicion and the diamond’s mysterious curse seem set to ruin everyone and everything she loves. Only Sergeant Cuff’s famous detective skills offer any hope of peace and a future for them all. The intricate plot and modern technique of multiple narrators made Wilkie Collin’s 1868 work a huge success in the Victorian sensation genre. With a reconstruction of the crime, red herrings and a ‘locked-room’ puzzle, The Moonstone was also a major precursor of the modern mystery novel.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141198873
- Where to Purchase:
The Murders in the Rue Morgue and Other Tales
- Author: Edgar Allan Poe
- Summary: Horror, madness, violence and the dark forces hidden in humanity abound in this collection of Poe’s brilliant tales, including – among others – the bloody, brutal and baffling murder of a mother and daughter in Paris in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, the creeping insanity of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’, the Gothic nightmare of ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, and the terrible doom of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141198972
- Where to Purchase:
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
- Author: Charles Dickens
- Summary: Charles Dickens’s last, unfinished, novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood is an atmospheric thriller set in a murky world of opium dens, dark fantasy and sexual obsession. In the middle of a storm on Christmas Eve the orphan Edwin Drood disappears, leaving behind nothing but his watch and the suspicion that his uncle John Jasper, madly in love with Edwin’s fiancée Rosa, is the killer. For, beneath the surface of the sleepy cathedral town of Cloisterham, this respectable choirmaster leads a drug-fuelled double life.
- Out of Print? Yes
- ISBN: 9780141199924
- Where I got mine from: I got mine from Abebooks. It’s not available very often so you can set an email alert.
New Grub Street
- Author: George Gissing
- Summary: An irresistible tale of ambitious hacks and struggling writers, New Grub Street is set in a twilit world of shabby Victorian London garrets. Amid the low-end publishers and cheap bookshops of Grub Street, the novelist Edwin Reardon is battling to make a living. While his friend Jasper, a striving young reporter, writers anything the market demands, Edwin’s determination to maintain his artistic integrity means that his life, career and marriage soon reach crisis.
- Out of Print? Yes
- ISBN: 9780141199931
- Where I got mine from: I got a copy from Abebooks, not an original edition. Though out of print, you can find it for a really good price on Abebooks and also on Amazon.
Nicholas Nickleby
- Author: Charles Dickens
- Out of Print? Yes
- ISBN: 9780141199818
- Where to Purchase: This is another of the hard to find out of print PELs (most of the Charles Dickens ones are.) I check Abebooks often.
North and South
- Author: Elizabeth Gaskell
- Summary: Elizabeth Gaskell’s compassionate, richly dramatic novel features one of the most original and fully-rounded female characters in Victorian fiction, Margaret Hale. It shows how, forced to move from the country to an industrial northern town, she develops a passionate sense of social justice, and a turbulent relationship with mill-owner John Thornton. North and South depicts a young woman discovering herself, in a nuanced portrayal of what divides people, and what brings them together.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141198927
- Where I got mine from: This was the very first PEL I bought. It’s not an original edition.
- Where to Purchase:
Northanger Abbey
- Author: Jane Austen
- Summary: The most youthful and optimistic of Jane Austen’s novels, Northanger Abbey tells the story of naive, charming Catherine Morland, who is obsessed with reading Gothic romance and horror. When Catherine is invited to stay at her new friends’ grand house, Northanger Abbey, with its mysterious suite of sealed-off rooms, her melodramatic imagination threatens to run away with her. As comic misunderstandings ensue, she comes to understand the gap between fantasy and reality, false friends and true feeling.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141389424
- Where I got mine from: I got mine new from Book Depository.
- Where to Purchase:
Nostromo
The Old Curiosity Shop
- Author: Charles Dickens
- Summary: Witty and fiendishly clever, these tales of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson see the duo solving mysteries in London’s foggy backstreets and behind the walls of country houses. In some of Conan Doyle’s most famous and devilishly difficult problems, they face locked rooms, strange letters, separated twins, and beautiful, brilliant Irene Adler. Hugely popular since publication, Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales have been adapted countless times on stage and screen, and continue to influence crime writers today.
- Out of Print? Yes
- ISBN: 9780141199580
- Where I got mine from: I found a copy on Abebooks for a reasonable price. This is one of the only out of print Charles Dickens out of print ones that tend to have copies available. Also check Amazon.
Oliver Twist
- Author: Charles Dickens
- Summary: Dark, mysterious and mordantly funny, Oliver Twist features some of the most memorably drawn villains in all of fiction – the treacherous gangmaster Fagin, the menacing thug Bill Sikes, the Artful Dodger and their den of thieves in the grimy London backstreets. Dicken’s novel is both an angry indictment of poverty, and an adventure filled with an air of threat and pervasive evil.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141198880
- Where to Purchase:
Our Mutual Friend
- Author: Charles Dickens
- Out of Print? Yes
- ISBN: 9780141199801
- Where to Purchase: I check Abebooks often. This is one of the hard to find out of print Charles Dickens PELs.
Pamela
Persuasion
- Author: Jane Austen
- Summary: Persuasion, Jane Austen’s last novel, is a moving masterly and elegiac love story tinged with the heartache of missed opportunities. It tells the story of Anne Elliot, who, persuaded to break off her engagement to the man she loved because he was not successful enough, has never forgotten him. When he returns, he brings with him a tantalizing second chance of happiness…
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141198835
- Where I got mine from: Not an original version. This was one of my first PELs that I got from Barnes and Noble online.
- Where to Purchase:
The Pickwick Papers
- Author: Charles Dickens
- Out of Print? Yes
- ISBN: 9780141199108
- Where to Purchase: Another hard to find out of print Charles Dickens PELs. Check Abebooks for a copy to show up.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
- Author: Oscar Wilde
- Summary: A story of evil, debauchery and scandal, Oscar Wilde’s only novel tells of Dorian Gray, a beautiful yet corrupt man. When he wishes that a perfect portrait of himself would bear the signs of ageing in his place, the picture becomes his hideous secret, as it follows Dorian’s own downward spiral into cruelty and depravity. The Picture of Dorian Gray is a masterpiece of the evil in men’s hearts, and is as controversial and alluring as Wilde himself.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199498
- Where I got mine from: I scored an original edition used from Abebooks.
- Where to Purchase:
The Portrait of a Lady
- Author: Henry James
- Summary: The Portrait of a Lady is an intensely moving masterpiece on a destructive power of love, and features Henry James’s most magnificent literary heroine. Isabel Archer, a wealthy, beautiful and spirited American, is expected to marry when she travels to Europe with her aunt. But Isabel is resolved to enjoy the freedom that her wealth brings, and must somehow choose between suitors who may all be hiding sickeningly different motives behind their avowals of love.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199122
- Where I got mine from: New from Book Depository.
- Where to Purchase:
Pride and Prejudice
- Author: Jane Austen
- Summary: With its sparkling wit, clever heroine and moving love story, Pride and Prejudice is an immaculate comedy of manners, and Jane Austen’s most popualr novel. Lizzy Bennet finds eligible bachelor Darcy arrogant the first time she meets him, and when she hears he has been meddling in her family’s affairs is determined to dislike him even more. Darcy, however finds himself increasingly attracted to her good looks and lively mind. In the story of misunderstandings that follows, Lizzy is led to questiond everything she thought she knew.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199078
- Where I got mine from: Got mine used but not an original edition.
- Where to Purchase:
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
The Return of the Native
Robinson Crusoe
- Author: Daniel Defoe
- Summary: Who has not dreamed of life on an exotic isle, far away from civilization? Here is the novel which has inspired countless imitations by lesser writers, none of which equal the power and originality of Defoe’s famous book. Robinson Crusoe, set ashore on an island after a terrible storm at sea, is forced to make do with only a knife, some tobacco, and a pipe. He learns how to build a canoe, make bread, and endure endless solitude. That is, until, twenty-four years later, when he confronts another human being. First published in 1719, Robinson Crusoe has been praised by such writers as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Johnson as one of the greatest novels in the English language.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199061
- Where to Purchase:
A Room with a View
- Author: E.M. Forster
- Summary: Lucy has her rigid, middle-class life mapped out for her until she visits Florence with her uptight cousin Charlotte, and finds her neatly ordered existence thrown off balance. Her eyes are opened by the unconventional characters she meets at the Pension Bertolini: flamboyant romantic novelist Eleanor Lavish, the Cockney Signora, curious Mr Emerson and, most of all, his passionate son George. Lucy finds herself torn between the intensity of life in Italy and the repressed morals of Edwardian England, personified in her terminally dull fiancé Cecil Vyse. Will she ever learn to follow her own heart?
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199825
- Where to Purchase:
Sanditon
- Author: Jane Austen
- Summary: Written in the last months of Austen’s life the tantalizing Sanditon features a glorious cast of hypochondriacs and speculators in a newly established seaside resort, and shows the author contemplating a changing society with scepticism and amusement. This edition also includes the early epistolary novel Lady Susan and the delightful fragment The Watsons.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780241433713
- Where I got mine from: It’s one of the newest PELs. I bought it at Book Depository.
- Where to Purchase:
The Scarlet Letter
- Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Summary: Fiercely romantic and hugely influential, The Scarlet Letter is the tale of Hester Prynne, imprisoned, publicly shamed, and forced to wear a scarlet ‘A’ for committing adultery and bearing an illegitimate child, Pearl. In their small, Puritan village, Hester and her daughter struggle to survive, but in this searing study of the tension between private and public existence, Hester Prynne’s inner strength and quiet dignity means she has frequently been seen as one of the first great heroines of American fiction.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199450
- Where to Purchase:
The Secret Agent
- Author: Joseph Conrad
- Summary: Prescient and shocking, The Secret Agent is a story of terrorism, espionage and revolutionary groups in nineteenth-century London. Quiet shop owner Verloc is a member of an anarchist group, and a secret agent for a foreign country, who becomes involved in a plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, with tragic consequences. Inspired by the real-life Greenwich bomb of 1894, The Secret Agent is a masterpiece of failed lives and complex moral dilemmas.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199559
- Where I got mine from: I got mine at a used bookstore in Edinburgh, Armchair Books.
- Where to Purchase:
Sense and Sensibility
- Author: Jane Austen
- Summary: Jane Austen’s moving depiction of wild emotions and bitterly suppressed feelings tells the story of two sisters: impulsive, idealistic Marianne, whose whirlwind romance with the unsuitable John Willoughby leaves her open to harmful gossip, and Elinor, who struggles quietly to conceal her own heartbreak, even from those closest to her. Through their parallel experience of love – and its threatened loss – the two sisters learn that the path to happiness is not easy in a society where status and money govern the rules of love.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199672
- Where I got mine from: I got an original copy at Abebooks.
- Where to Purchase:
Shirley
- Author: Charlotte Bronte
- Out of Print? Yes
- ISBN: 9780141199535
- Where to Purchase: Check Abebooks. Prices have varied.
The Sign of Four
- Author: Arthur Conan Doyle
- Summary: The Sign of Four is one of Sherlock Holmes’s great adventures, a tale of ‘an injured lady, half a million in treasure, a black cannibal, and a wooden-legged ruffian’. In the yellow fog of London, a young woman comes to 221b Baker Street with the strange tale of a missing father and the mysterious pearls she is sent anonymously each year. Holmes and Watson are soon swept up in an international puzzle of murder, millions and madness that could cost them their lives.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141395487
- Where I got mine from: Not an original version. I got mine from a bookstore on Victoria Street in Edinburgh.
- Where to Purchase:
Silas Marner
- Author: George Eliot
- Summary: Wrongly accused of theft and exiled from a religious community many years before, the embittered weaver Silas Marner lives alone in Raveloe, living only for work and his precious hoard of money. But when his money is stolen and an orphaned child finds her way into his house, Silas is given the chance to transform his life. His fate, and that of the little girl he adopts, is entwined with Godfrey Cass, son of the village Squire, who, like Silas, is trapped by his past. Silas Marner, George Eliot’s favourite of her novels, combines humour, rich symbolism and pointed social criticism to create an unsentimental but affectionate portrait of rural life.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141389455
- Where I got mine from: Not an original version. I got mine from a bookstore on Victoria Street in Edinburgh.
- Where to Purchase:
The Small House at Allington
- Author: Anthony Trollope
- Summary: In this lively, intimate portrayal of county society Trollope introduces us to two of his most endearing heroines, the spirited, independent-minded Lily and Bell Dale, who live with their windowed mother. As one sister is betrayed by the ambitious man she adores, while the other must confront her reluctance to let any man near her heart, Trollope weaves together an intricate story of thwarted love, self-deception and social climbing. Written when he was the height of his popularity, The Small House of Allington brilliantly dramatizes the ways in which personal dilemmas are affected by worldly pressures. The fifth book in the Chronicles of Barsetshire.
- Out of Print? Yes
- ISBN: 9780141199658
- Where I got mine from: I got mine from Amazon. It’s out of print and you can usually find a copy around Amazon and Abebooks.
- Where to Purchase:
Sons and Lovers
- Author: D.H. Lawrence
- Summary: The marriage of Gertrude and Walter Morel has become a battleground. Repelled by her uneducated and sometimes violent husband, delicate Gertrude devotes her life to her children, especially to her sons, William and Paul – determined they will not follow their father into working down the coal mines. But conflict is evitable when Paul seeks to escape his mother’s suffocating grasp through relationships with women his own age. Set in Lawrence’s native Nottinghamshire, Sons and Lovers is a highly autobiographical and compelling portrayal of childhood, adolescence and the clash of generations.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199856
- Where I got mine from: I got mine from Amazon. It’s out of print and you can usually find a copy around Amazon and Abebooks.
- Where to Purchase:
A Study in Scarlet
- Author: Arthur Conan Doyle
- Summary: The very first of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, A Study in Scarlet revels the early days of Holmes and Watson’s friendship, and exactly how the former doctor became involved in a life of crime-solving. A body is found in a grimy house in south London, its face twisted by fear and horror, with the word ‘RACHE’ scrawled on the wall in blood beside it – yet the corpse itself is completely unscathed. How did this man meet such a strange and terrible end? The answer is darker than anyone could imagine.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141395524
- Where I got mine from: Used from Abebooks (but not original.)
- Where to Purchase:
A Tale of Two Cities
- Author: Charles Dickens
- Summary: Described by Dickens as ‘the best story I have written’, A Tale of Two Cities interweaves thrilling historical drama with heartbreaking personal tragedy. It vividly depicts a revolutionary Paris running red with blood, and a London where the poor starve. In the midst of the chaos two men – an exiled French aristocrat and a dissolute English lawyer – are both redeemed and condemned by their love for the same woman, as the shadow of La Guillotine draws closer…
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199702
- Where I got mine from: Used from Abebooks (but not original.)
- Where to Purchase:
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
- Author: Anne Bronte
- Summary: This sensational, hard-hitting and passionate tale of marital cruelty sees a mysterious new tenant at Wildfell Hall, Helen Graham, unmasked not as a ‘wicked woman’ as the local gossips would have it, but as the estranged wife of a brutal alcoholic bully, desperate to protect her son. Using her own experiences with her brother Branwell to depict the cruelty and debauchery from which Helen flees, Anne Bronte wrote her masterpiece to reflect the fragile position of women in society and her belief in universal redemption.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199351
- Where I got mine from: Not an original version. My copy is new from Book Depository.
- Where to Purchase:
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
- Author: Thomas Hardy
- Summary: With its sensitive depiction of a wronged ‘pure woman’ and its powerful criticism of Victorian sexual hypocrisy, Tess of the D’Ubervilles shocked readers on publication.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199948
- Where I got mine from: I got an original edition from Abebooks.
- Where to Purchase:
The Time Machine
- Author: H.G. Wells
- Summary: Chilling, prophetic and hugely influential, The Time Machine sees a Victorian scientist propel himself into the year 802,701 AD, where he is delighted to find that suffering has been replaced by beauty and contentment in the form of the Eloi, an elfin species descended from man. But he soon realizes that they are simply remnants of a once-great culture – now weak and living in terror of the sinister Morlocks lurking in the deep tunnels, who threaten his very return home. H. G. Wells defined much of modern science fiction with this 1895 tale of time travel, which questions humanity, society, and our place on Earth.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199344
- Where to Purchase:
Tom Jones
Treasure Island and The Ebb-Tide
- Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
- Summary: A thrilling coming-of-age novel about bravery, adventure, good and evil, Treasure Island is the story of young Jim Hawkins, who discovers a treasure map marked with an X. But Jim has no way of knowing that Long John Silver, his friendly new crew-mate on the quest for the buried hoard, is determined to keep the treasure for himself, at any cost.Treasure Island is paired here with Stevenson’s extraordinary, savage late novella The Ebb-Tide, which features a tropical island and a ship with a very different crew.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199146
- Where I got mine from: I didn’t get an original version. Bought it at Waterstones in Edinburgh.
- Where to Purchase:
Two on a Tower
- Author: Thomas Hardy
- Summary: Hardy’s atmospheric, moving story of star-crossed lovers shows human beings at the mercy of forces far beyond their control, setting a tragic drama of human passion and conflict against a background of vast stellar space and scientific discovery. Two on a Tower tells the story of Lady Constantine, who breaks all the rules of decorum when she falls in love with the beautiful youth Swithin St Cleeve, her social inferior and ten years her junior. Together, in an ancient monument converted into an astronomical observation tower, they create their own private universe – until the pressures of the outside world threaten to destroy it.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199436
- Where to Purchase:
Under the Greenwood Tree
- Author: Thomas Hardy
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141389486
- Where to Purchase: One of the difficult to find Thomas Hardy out of print books. Check Abebooks and stay on the email alert list.
The Valley of Fear
- Author: Arthur Conan Doyle
- Summary: The deadly hand of Professor Moriarty once more reaches out to commit a vile and ingenious crime, but a mole in Moriarty’s criminal organization alerts Sherlock Holmes of the evil deed by means of a cipher . . .When Holmes and Watson arrive at a Sussex manor house they appear to be too late. The discovery of a body suggests that Moriarty’s henchmen have been at their work. But there is much more to this tale of murder than at first meets the eye.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141395562
- Where to Purchase:
Vanity Fair
- Author: William Makepeace Thackeray
- Summary: Witty and fiendishly clever, these tales of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson see the duo solving mysteries in London’s foggy backstreets and behind the walls of country houses. In some of Conan Doyle’s most famous and devilishly difficult problems, they face locked rooms, strange letters, separated twins, and beautiful, brilliant Irene Adler. Hugely popular since publication, Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales have been adapted countless times on stage and screen, and continue to influence crime writers today.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199641
- Where I got mine from: Not an original version. Got mine used from Abebooks but in almost like new condition.
- Where to Purchase:
Villette
- Author: Charlotte Bronte
- Summary: Often accompanied as her greatest and most mature work, Charlotte Bronte’s last, most autobiographical novel drew on her own unhappy experiences as a governess in Brussels. to create a powerful study of unrequited love.Lucy Snowe is alone, without friends or family. When she sets sail from England to find work at a girls’ boarding school in the town of Villette, she struggles with unruly pupils, and with her own troubling passions: first for the school’s English doctor and then for dictatorial professor Paul Emmanuel.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199887
- Where I got mine from: Got an original copy from Abebooks.
- Where to Purchase:
The War of the Worlds
- Author: H.G. Wells
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199047
- Where to Purchase:
The Warden
- Author: Anthony Trollope
- Summary: Trollope’s witty, satirical story of a quiet cathedral town shaken by scandal – as the traditional values of Septimus Harding are attacked by zealous reformers and ruthless newspapers – is a drama of conscience that pits individual integrity against worldly ambition. The first book in the Chronicles of Barsetshire.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141198996
- Where I got mine from: I scored an original edition from Abebooks. I bought it used and it arrived in perfect condition.
- Where to Purchase:
Washington Square
- Author: Henry James
- Summary: James’s masterly novel set in the nineteenth century New York society is a devastating study of innocence destroyed.When plain Catherine Sloper acquires a dashing, determines suitor, her father, convinced that the young man is a fortune-hunter, decides to end their romance. Torn between her desire to win her father’s approval and her passion for the first an to notice her, Catherine faces an agonizing dilemma, and becomes all too aware of the limits on her freedom.
- Out of Print? Yes
- ISBN: 9780141389493
- Where I got mine from: I scored a copy for a really good price on Amazon. I’ve rarely see copies available, but check Amazon and also check Abebooks. There may be some occasionally.
- Where to Purchase:
The Way of All Flesh
- Author: Samuel Butler
- Summary: Written with great humour, irony and honesty, The Way of All Flesh exploded perceptions of the Victorian middle-class family in its radical depiction of Ernest Pontifex, a young man who casts off his background and discovers himself. The awkward but likeable son of a tyrannical clergyman and a priggish mother, and destined to follow his father into the church, Ernest gleefully rejects his parents’ respectability, and chooses instead to find his own way in the world.
- Out of Print? Yes
- ISBN: 9780141199153
- Where to Purchase: Check Abebooks. From what I’ve seen, there’s always a few available at less than $10.
Where Angels Fear to Tread
- Author: E.M. Forster
- Summary: E. M. Forster’s first novel is a witty comedy of manners that is tinged with tragedy. It tells the story of Lilia Herriton, who proves to be an embarrassment to her late husband’s family as, in the small Tuscan town of Monteriano, she begins a relationship with a much younger Italian man – classless, uncouth and highly unsuitable. A subtle attack on decorous Edwardian values and a humanely sympathetic portrayal of the clash of two cultures, Where Angels Fear to Tread is also a profound exploration of character and virtue.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199252
- Where to Purchase:
The Wings of the Dove
- Author: Henry James
- Out of Print? Yes
- ISBN: 9780141199849
- Where to Purchase: I don’t think I’ve ever seen this available anywhere. I check Abebooks occasionally.
Wives and Daughters
- Author: Elizabeth Gaskell
- Summary: With its lively depiction of a close-knit, gossiping community and its richly drawn female characters, Elizabeth Gaskell’s last and finest novel is a warm, funny portrayal of human relationships.When seventeen-year-old Molly Gibson’s widowed father remarries, her life is thrown off course by her vain, manipulative stepmother and enlivened by a glamorous new stepsister, Cynthia. Molly soon finds herself a go-between in Cynthia’s romantic affairs – but in doing so risks losing her reputation and the man she secretly loves.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141389462
- Where I got mine from: Not an original version. I got mine new from Book Depository. Would love to replace with an original edition soon.
- Where to Purchase:
The Woman in White
- Author: Wilkie Collins
- Summary: The first and greatest of the bestselling Victorian thrillers known as ‘sensation novels’, The Woman in White opens with a chilling encounter between drawing teacher Walter Hartright and a ghostly female figure on a moonlit road. From this moment Walter is drawn into a terrifying world of intrigue, crime, disguise and insanity, as he tries to save his beautiful pupil Laura from the sinister plans of Sir Percival Glyde and the ‘Napolean of Crime’, Count Fosco, in one of the most gripping plots in English fiction.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141389431
- Where I got mine from: I got an original edition from Abebooks.
- Where to Purchase:
Wuthering Heights
- Author: Emily Bronte
- Summary: Wuthering Heights has achieved an almost mythical status as a love story, yet it is also a unique masterpiece of the imagination: an unsettling, transgressive novel about obsession, violence and death.It begins as a man is forced to shelter at a strange, grim house on the Yorkshire moors during a snowstorm. There he discovers the tempestuous events that took place there years before: the intense love between Catherine Earnshaw and the foundling Heathcliff, her betrayal of him and how his terrible revenge continues to haunt the present.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141199085
- Where I got mine from: I got an original copy from Abebooks.
- Where to Purchase:
2018 Penguin English Library Books
Animal Farm
- Author: George Orwell
- Summary: When the downtrodden animals of Manor Farm overthrow their master Mr Jones and take over the farm themselves, they imagine it is the beginning of a life of freedom and equality. But gradually a cunning, ruthless élite among them, masterminded by the pigs Napoleon and Snowball, starts to take control. Soon the other animals discover that they are not all as equal as they thought, and find themselves hopelessly ensnared as one form of tyranny is replaced with another.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780241341667
At the Mountains of Madness
- Author: H.P. Lovecraft
- Summary: An expedition to Antarctica goes horribly wrong as a group of explorers stumbles upon some mysterious ancient ruins, with devastating consequences. At the Mountains of Madness ranks among Lovecraft’s most terrifying novellas, and is a firm favourite among fans of classic horror.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780241341315
The Awakening
- Author: Kate Chopin
- Summary: Kate Chopin’s stories of frustrated lives and forbidden passions explored women’s experiences in a way that had never been done before. This selection includes The Awakening, her novella of a married woman’s sexual liberation that caused outrage on its publication at the end of the nineteenth century, as well as further tales of shocking revelations, brief pleasures and female relationships set in her home state of Louisiana and beyond.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780241341421
The Beetle
- Author: Richard Marsh
- Summary: Eminent politician Paul Lessingham is the toast of Westminster, but when ‘the Beetle’ arrives from Egypt to hunt him down, the dark and gruesome secret that haunts him is dragged into the light. Bent on revenge for a crime committed against the disciples of an Egyptian goddess, the Beetle terrorizes its victims and will stop at nothing until it has satisfaction.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780241341353
The Call of the Wild
- Author: Jack London
- Summary: The biting cold and the aching silence of the far North become an unforgettable backdrop for Jack London’s vivid, rousing, superbly realistic wilderness adventure stories featuring the author’s unique knowledge of the Yukon and the behavior of humans and animals facing nature at its cruelest.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780241341490
The Day of the Locust
- Author: Nathanael West
- Summary: Tod Hackett is a brilliant young artist – and a man in danger of losing his heart. Brought to an LA studio as a set-designer, he is soon caught up in a fantasy world where the cult of celebrity rules. But when he becomes besotted by the beautiful Faye, an aspiring actress and occasional call-girl, his dream rapidly becomes a nightmare. For, with little in the way of looks and no money to buy her time, Tod’s desperate passion can only lead to frustration, disillusionment and rage.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780141198835
- Where I got mine from: Bought mine in a bookstore in Copenhagen.
Elizabeth and her German Garden
- Author: Elizabeth von Arnim
- Summary: Taking respite from the Man of Wrath, her children and her stifling household, Elizabeth discovers that the path to joy lies in having a garden, rather than a room, of one’s own. This enchanting semi-autobiographical novel delighted readers when it first appeared in 1898 and has never been out of print since.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780241341292
- Where to Purchase:
The Garden Party
- Author: Katherine Mansfield
- Summary: These fifteen luminous tales of love and loneliness, kindness and cruelty are some of the greatest short stories every written. ‘The Garden Party’ tells the haunting story of how a wealthy family’s celebration is marred by tragedy, leading to a life-changing revelation, while each of the miniature masterpieces in this collection is filled with the unspoken, half-understood emotions and fleeting moments that make up everyday existence.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780241341643
- Where I got mine from: I got mine during my third trip to Edinburgh at my favorite bookstore, Golden Hare Books.
Ghost Stories
- Author: M.R. James
- Summary: The aim of a good ghost story is to make the blood freeze, pleasurably, and this M. R. James achieves to perfection in these wonderful stories. His most atmospheric settings include English country houses and gardens, the north end of the churchyard, the yew-maze in ‘Mr Humphreys and his Inheritance’ and the unforgettable train journey in ‘Casting the Runes’. To each of these stories he brings an eye for the telling detail, an imaginative twist and a narrative tone that is, at least to begin with, urbane and reassuring …
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780241341629
The Great Gatsby
- Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Summary: Jay Gatsby is the man who has everything. But one thing will always be out of his reach … Everybody who is anybody is seen at his glittering parties. Day and night his Long Island mansion buzzes with bright young things drinking, dancing and debating his mysterious character. For Gatsby – young, handsome, fabulously rich – always seems alone in the crowd, watching and waiting, though no one knows what for. Beneath the shimmering surface of his life he is hiding a secret: a silent longing that can never be fulfilled. And soon this destructive obsession will force his world to unravel.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780241341469
The Great God Pan
- Author: Arthur Machen
- Summary: A doctor performs an experiment on a young woman that goes horribly wrong, and a series of increasingly strange events follow: sinister woodland rituals, disappearances, suicides… Viewed as immoral and decadent on first publication in 1894, Machen’s weird tale has since established itself as a classic of its genre and has been described by Stephen King as ‘one of the best horror stories ever written. Maybe the best in the English language’.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780241341124
A Handful of Dust
- Author: Evelyn Waugh
- Summary: After seven years of marriage, the beautiful Lady Brenda Last is bored with life at Hetton Abbey, the Gothic mansion that is the pride and joy of her husband, Tony. She drifts into an affair with the shallow socialite John Beaver and forsakes Tony for the Belgravia set. Brilliantly combining tragedy, comedy and savage irony, A Handful of Dust captures the irresponsible mood of the ‘crazy and sterile generation’ between the wars.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780241341100
Little Women
- Author: Louisa May Alcott
- Summary: Meg, Jo, Amy and Beth – four “little women” enduring hardships and enjoying adventures in Civil War New England The charming story of the March sisters, Little Women has been adored by generations. Readers have rooted for Laurie in his pursuit of Jo’s hand, cried over little Beth’s death, and dreamed of travelling through Europe with old Aunt March and Amy. Future writers have found inspiration in Jo’s devotion to her writing. In this simple, enthralling tale, both parts of which are included here, Louisa May Alcott has created four of American literature’s most beloved women.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780241335130
Mrs. Dalloway
- Author: Virginia Woolf
- Summary: Mrs Dalloway captures the events of one June day in London, moment by moment, as different lives collide. Clarissa Dalloway, the glamorous wife of an MP, is preparing for a party she is giving that evening, and remembering those she once loved. In another part of the city, Septimus Smith is being driven mad by shell shock. As the day draws to an end, different worlds, past, present and future, are brought together.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780241341117
- Where I got mine from: I got mine new from Book Depository.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
- Author: George Orwell
- Summary: George Orwell’s terrifying vision of a totalitarian regime has become a touchstone for human freedom ever since its publication, and is one of the most widely read books in the world. Ruled by the Party, controlled by the watchful gaze of Big Brother and punished by the Thought Police, no one is free in this dystopian world. But, hidden away in an office in the Ministry of Truth, Winston Smith longs for liberty, and starts to rebel.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780241341650
- Where I got mine from: I got mine new from Waterstones in Manchester, England.
Peter Pan
- Author: J.M. Barrie
- Summary: It was Friday night. Mr and Mrs Darling were dining out. Nana had been tied up in the backyard. The poor dog was barking, for she could smell danger. And she was right – this was the night that Peter Pan would take the Darling children on the most breath-taking adventure of their lives, to a place called Neverland, a strange country where the lost boys live and never grow up, a land with mermaids, fairies and pirates – and of course the terrible, evil, Captain Hook. Peter Pan is undoubtedly one of the most famous and best-loved stories for children, an unforgettable, magical fantasy which has been enjoyed by generations.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780241341391
The Scarlet Pimpernel
- Author: Emmuska Orczy
- Summary: The thrilling story of an aristocratic hero with a double life, The Scarlet Pimpernel set the standard for all tales of masked avengers that would follow. It is the height of the Terror in Paris, and few can escape la guillotine. Yet, somehow, an elusive Englishman is rescuing imprisoned noblemen and spiriting them across the Channel to safety – a dazzling swordsman and escape artist, known only by the red flower on his calling card, the Scarlet Pimpernel…
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780241341339
- Where I got mine from: New from Book Depository.
Tender is the Night
- Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Summary: Between the First World War and the Wall Street Crash the French Riviera was the stylish place for wealthy Americans to visit. Among the most fashionable are psychoanalyst Dick Diver and his wife Nicole, who hold court at their villa. Into their circle comes Rosemary Hoyt, a film star, who is instantly attracted to them, but understands little of the dark secrets and hidden corruption that hold them together. As Dick draws closer to Rosemary, he fractures the delicate structure of his marriage and sets both Nicole and himself on to a dangerous path where only the strongest can survive. In this exquisite, lyrical novel, Fitzgerald has poured much of the essence of his own life; he has also depicted the age of materialism, shattered idealism and broken dreams.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780241341483
The Thirty-Nine Steps
- Author: John Buchan
- Summary: Richard Hannay has just returned to England after years in South Africa and is thoroughly bored with his life in London. But then a murder is committed in his flat, just days after a chance encounter with an American who had told him about an assassination plot which could have dire international consequences. An obvious suspect for the police and an easy target for the killers, Hannay goes on the run in his native Scotland where he will need all his courage and ingenuity to stay one step ahead of his pursuers.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780241341254
To the Lighthouse
- Author: Virginia Woolf
- Summary: An extraordinarily poignant evocation of a lost happiness that lives on in the memory, To the Lighthouse centres on a family holiday. For years the Ramsays have spent every summer on the Isle of Skye, and they expect these annual outings will go on forever. But nothing stays the same. In a novel that captures the ebb and flow of time and the tides, Virginia Woolf captures the intensity of childhood delight and the complexity of adult relationships.
- Out of Print? No
- ISBN: 9780241341681
- Where I got mine from: New from The English Bookshop in Stockholm.
Coming Soon
- The Complete Novels of Jane Austen
- Author: Jane Austen
- ISBN: 9780141993744
- Releasing: May 7, 2020
- The Cop and the Anthem and Other Stories
- Author: O. Henry
- Summary: One of the most popular American writers of the twentieth century, O. Henry’s comic eye and unique, playful approach to the rough material of life’s realities are unmatched. These stories, which range from the cattle-lands of Texas to the bars of New York, highlight the joys of avoiding habit and convention, and demonstrate O. Henry’s mastery of speech and place.
- ISBN: 9780241447468
- Releasing: September 3, 2020
My Tips for Purchasing Penguin English Library Books
As a general rule, if you’re interested in getting an original edition, buy the PEL used. I also will typically only purchase the book if it’s in Very Good condition and try to avoid ex-library copies. I’ve purchased Good before and there have been lots of stains. Meanwhile, ex-library copies usually have the library name printed on the spine of the book. Or other stickers on the cover that are difficult to remove.
Try reaching out to the bookseller and don’t be surprised if you end up getting a wrong edition. For example, I once purchased The Mystery of Edwin Drood where the listing looked like a PEL but when it came in the mail, it was just a generic copy. So when I saw another listing appear a few months later, I contacted the bookseller directly (this was on Amazon) asking if the spine was orange. They were kind enough to send a picture to show me that it was an orange spine, confirming it was the correct edition.
Though I’ve linked to the US Amazon, it might be worth also copying and pasting the ISBN into google and seeing which other sites pop up. You might be able to get a copy of whichever PEL you’re looking for on an international Amazon site and can purchase it through there.
Penguin English Library Resources
- Follow me on Instagram to follow along my journey of collecting and reading all 126 Penguin English Library books. Also happy to answer any questions or just discuss PELs 🙂 And if you have any other tips, please do let me know so I can update this page.
- If you track your reading on Goodreads, there’s a full list of PELs here that you can save to your own lists.
- Check out Coralie Bickford-Smith’s Instagram. She’s the designer and has announced new PELs on her account.
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