JUNE / JULY 2007 CLASSICS NEWSLETTER

Summer Essentials

 
Sunscreen? Check. Camera? Check. Flip flops? Check. Sunglasses? Check. The Swiss Family Robinson? Anyone? Anyone? This beloved tale of shipwreck and survival is the perfect book to fuel your summer fantasies. Whether you're headed to the beach, or on a cruise, or to an exotic tropical island, the beloved story of a family marooned on a deserted island, where they build a new home, explore the landscape, and fend off threats from the wild, is the ultimate adventure novel--and a handy recap of all you've picked up from watching Survivor and Lost should you ever need to look up how to build a treehouse, defend yourself from bees, or fish for your dinner.
 
What's great about the Penguin Classics edition is that it's the fully restored original. The real Swiss Family Robinson was written in German back in 1812. A few years later it was translated into English (by William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, the parents of Frankenstein author Mary Shelley), and it was an immediate popular success. Over the years it was freely translated into other languages, most notably French by the Baroness Isabelle de Montolieu. Subsequent English editions adopted the Baroness's many additions to the text, and the story that became familiar to readers after 1848 was then revised several more times, in 1868, 1878, and 1879, taking the story even further from the original. Among the most striking changes over the years was the significant scaling back of the role of the mother, who in the new Penguin Classics edition assumes her rightful place in the family, and in literary history.

Looking for a gift for Dad? Penguin Classics has a new book that's perfect for dads of all kinds, from veterans and Civil War buffs, to gamblers and card sharks, to sports fans, cops, gearheads, aviators, paragliders, comic book aficionados, and connoisseurs of Americana. It's called Dashing Diamond Dick, and it brings together five dime novels from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when they were as popular as today's comic books--or Us Weekly!
 
Small enough for Civil War soldiers to slip into their coat pockets, dime novels captured in popular fiction the larger-than-life characters from the early days of the American republic--characters like Dashing Diamond Dick, a handsome gambler who defends the honor of a beautiful woman against the brute attentions of Tornado Tom; or the ambitious young inventor Frank Reade, who invents a newfangled flying machine so he can soar over the Andes; or the mythic baseball player Frank Merriwell, one of the most popular characters in the dime novel pantheon, who rallies his Yale teammates to defeat archrival Harvard; or the Liberty Boys of the American Revolution, who infiltrate the ranks of the British on Long Island; or the eminent New York detective Nick Carter, who pursues his nemesis, the mysterious Doctor Quartz. All are here in Dashing Diamond Dick, a one-of-a-kind book celebrating the valiant heroes and notorious rogues who gave rise to the icons of pulp novels, genre films, and comic books of today.

Instead of making the painstaking choice between another tie or baseball cap, or madly skimming through your digital photo archives for the perfect shot for grandpa, give the gift of a Penguin Classic for dear old Dad.


for The Spy and Espionage Fan: Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene 
  
for The Fisherman: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
 
for The Reluctant Dieter: The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) 

for The Commander-in-Chief: The Art of War by Sun-tzu (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) 

for The Family Road Trip Master: Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck
  
for The CEO: The Gospel of Wealth by Andrew Carnegie 

for The Inventor: Relativity by Albert Einstein 

for The Armchair Historian: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West

for The Patriarch: The Iliad and The Odyssey Boxed Set by Homer