Editor Simon Winder looks back on a curious attempt to make philosophy popular.

Glazed, shaky, politically and philosophically confused, I have just finished up editing the 100th and last Penguin Great Ideas title. Why we should stop the series at this specific, wholly arbitrary number is the sort of issue which would have delighted some of the more annoying authors in the series but, setting that aside, we have now published five sets of twenty and it is time to stop and do something different.  Nobody is saying that these are the hundred Great Ideas – just a hundred, with plenty of shameful omissions, insulting inclusions and unthinking biases trailing in a vast cloud behind them.

The very simple idea was to republish books mostly already available through Penguin Classics in a form close to that recognised by the book’s original author – to strip away the accretion of prefaces, introductions and notes which were so important to studying an author in favour of just presenting the text itself, so that once more the reader can open The Social Contract and simply read ‘Man is born free, and he is everywhere in chains’.

Looking back, I cannot really remember how the list was put together.  Colleagues and authors have throughout made various important, ingenious and unhelpful suggestions.  My own hope had been to smuggle through the back door various more-or-less doomed, non-selling favourites while all attention was focussed on the obvious crowd pleasers like Marcus Aurelius coming through the main entrance.  

This has worked – but not as planned, as the popularity of the series swept up the most implausible figures.  We had hardly been able to keep in print John Ruskin’s selected writings, but a tiny group of my favourite essays suddenly sold some 70,000 copies.  William Hazlitt enjoyed a similar dizzy success.  We were selling so many books that an entire generation of students were radicalized by Paine, Rousseau, Wollstonecraft and Marx completely by accident.  We suddenly found a format in which tremendous numbers of readers started for the first time reading George Orwell’s essays – about 140,000 of Orwell titles in the series so far.  I hit the ground with a crunch though with Sir Thomas Browne’s Urne-Burial which, despite being my favourite piece of English prose, even in Great Ideas managed to find no audience whatsoever.

A key aspect of the series has been their remarkable look, created by the designer David Pearson, and with some notable contributions by Phil Baines, Catherine Dixon and Alistair Hall.  Messing around with different historical typefaces and with a similar stripped-down atmosphere to the content (two colours, mostly just lettering – with the occasional loopy exception), these jackets transformed the books’ success.  I remember standing in Foyles watching as wave upon wave of morbid, sexually-confused students came capering up to a ziggurat-like display of Great Ideas, snatching them up like penny candy.  Of course, the authors were crucial to this – but it would be an austere figure indeed who did not react to the beguiling designs for Hume’s On Suicide or Schopenhauer’s On the Suffering of the World.

Perhaps then what is most curious about the series is that it has introduced an astonishing number of readers to wildly clashing ideas and has provoked an interest in levels of abstraction not usually associated with the British Mind.  Great Ideas has all kinds of omissions and failures, but anything which has provoked unprecedented numbers of people to read Hazlitt or Woolf or Stevenson has to come out ahead.

 
 

My favourite book in the whole series is a small group of essays by John Berger called Why Look at Animals?  Each of the essays are masterpieces, some of the best writing of the 20th century on the human relationship with the natural world.  Berger added to the book a short fable, ‘A Mouse Story’ and a lovely page of his drawings of mice.  But it is the last essay which most sticks in my mind: an account of Berger spending the day in the Austrian countryside with the Marxist critic, Ernst Fischer.  This proves to be the last day of Fischer’s life and many of the themes of this whole series are brought together in a meditation on history, Stoicism, friendship and the overwhelming importance of ideas and argument.  It is a great piece of writing and, for me, just to have encountered it has made the whole Great Ideas enterprise worthwhile.

Simon Winder
Publishing Director, Penguin Press

.............................................................................

Remember that by posting a comment you are agreeing to the website Terms of Use. If you consider any content on this site to be inappropriate, please report it to Penguin Books by emailing reportabuse@penguin.co.uk

..............................................................................

Comments

[Callum Saunders]

I remember seeing the first beguiling series of ‘Great Ideas’ books lining the shelves of my local bookshop and thinking what a wonderful discovery I had made.

In an age when the role of traditional publishing is constantly scrutinised by detractors and digital purists, it’s affirming indeed to see how publishing can still play such a vital role in contributing to society and education.

These books have introduced myself, and no doubt thousands of others, to charming works that they otherwise would have drifted through life without having chanced across.

My honest belief is that the ‘Great Ideas’ series has been one of the most innovative publishing stories of the last few years and has played a crucial role in societal education, offering people glimpses into truly great works.

Hats off to everyone at Penguin – publishing remains the very cornerstone of freedom, education and civilisation. I am sad to see the ‘Great Ideas’ series come to an end but have no doubt whatsoever that this striving for publishing innovation will lead to more innovative collections and literature in the future.

Thank you Penguin.

[Kevin Faulkner]

Penguin may have had a greater success with Sir Thomas Browne's 'Urn-Burial' had they taken the revolutionary step of adhering to the author's intentions and being the first publisher in 50 years to print BOTH discourses 'Urn' and 'The Garden of Cyrus' together.

[Daniel]

So the reasoning behind stopping the series is 'just because'? Doesn't seem like a great idea to me.

[Luke Tonge]

Box set of all the complete series please...

[Idlersjournal.blogspot.com]

I am so heartbroken that this series has come to an end...it has gotten me reading again, and personally, I feel it has reinvigorated a generation that has lost contact with its desperately needed daily doses of intelligence. I wish there was something I could say to get you to reconsider ending this series, but I'm not sure what that would be - suffice it to say, I will miss it tremendously.
Thank you for doing it.
Yours,
The Idler.

[Kelton Holrook]

I live in America and really enjoy some information on whether or not the five complete series will be available here. If this is not possible, can anyone help me discover a way to import the series to, Orem, Utah?

[CJ]

Kelton - I've had sucess finding most titles not available in US bookstores on Amazon.com.

I too wish the complete set was more readily available here in the U.S.

[Jason Liske]

I've been thinking of starting a petition to get Penguin to do just one more, one more series - there is so much to still release! These books have made all the difference in so many lives - I think the ending of the series needs to be reconsidered; do an encore series at least. What about the following (with some suggested titles)
John Henry Newman - excerpts from the "Apologia Pro Vita Sua"
Spinoza - excerpts from "Ethics"
George Berkeley - "Principles of Human Knowledge" or the Three Dialogues
Aristotle - "On Virtue" (excerpts from the "Ethics")
Diderot - "D'Alembert's Dream"
Jean-Paul Sartre - "On Freedom"
Plotinus - "On Evil"
Rousseau - "Discourse on the Arts and Sciences"
Engels - "The Conditions of the Working Class"
The Cloud of Unknowing
Heraclitus - "Aphorisms"
Martin Heidegger - "On Technology"
St. Anselm of Canterbury - "Proslogion"
Simone de Beavoir - "The Second Sex"

Don't end this series - this is one case where "less is more" is a dreadful curse. Best series of all time.

[Idlersjournal.blogspot.com]

http://idlersjournal.blogspot.com/2010/10/on-why-penguin-books-great-ideas-series.html

In homage to the series - my hat will always go off to Penguin for this collection of books.
PS: If you wish me to take the book covers down, please let me know immediately. I do not wish to infringe on any copyrights!

[Albert Wojciech Łukasz Kaszuba]

when the books are as epub available?

[Will Davison]

Don't forget Yevgeny Zamyatin's 'On Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters', and some of his other essays. They're undoubtedly of the same calibre as Orwell's essays.

Really great series though, just a shame it had to end.

[Little House On The Prairie DVD box set]

That is so true! Thanks for the article. I know this from my experience too.Thank you for your participation in our blog, and together we can reference the complex problems; Hope to meet you in the next time. The job is very suitable for you.