Modern Classics

[close] This group only reads books published by Penguin Modern Classics. Penguin Modern Classics were born in 1961, when the renowned Penguin editor Tony Godwin decided that the great authors of the twentieth century – such as James Joyce, Joseph Conrad and Evelyn Waugh – had achieved the same classic status as Homer or Dickens, and that the reading public who enjoyed them deserved a separate list of contemporary, beautifully designed editions. The result was Penguin Modern Classics, with their distinctive grey spines and evocative pictorial covers. Many of them were given eye-opening, avant-garde images by the legendary s designer Germano Facetti – a look that, after various incarnations, still inspires their current design. The first books ever published in this new series – including Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Carson McCuller’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby – are still considered landmark classics, read and loved today. [close]