Penguin Clothbound Classics presents beautiful gift-worthy hardcover editions of beloved classic literature. Each book has a minimal and unique cover design, and award-winning designer Coralie Bickford-Smith designs them. Coralie’s talent gives these books a modern, elegant look. When you see them at a book store, I am pretty sure you would want to buy the entire collection at that moment!
Moreover, Penguin Clothbound Classics are the literary classics; everyone should have them in their library. My first book from this collection was Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment.” After that, I started collecting these beautifully designed books.
What are the Best Books from Penguin Clothbound Classics?
For me, almost every book from this collection is the best! But if I need to make a top-five list, I would choose Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
Below, you will find almost fifty beautiful books from Penguin Clothbound Classics! Mostly, you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, however, you can judge these books by their covers!
These exquisite and collectible editions are published as a part of Penguin’s beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series. Designed by the multi-award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, the series features editions that are bound in high-quality, colorful, and tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. Mr. Thomas Gradgrind, the headmaster of Coketown’s school and a paragon of utilitarian achievement, is the most prominent figure in the town. By indoctrinating his students and his own family with information, he discourages their capacity for fantasy and wonder. As a direct result of this, his compliant daughter Louisa weds the heartless businessman and self-proclaimed “bully of humanity,” Mr. Bounderby and his defiant son Tom became involved in illegal activities such as gambling and robbing. And as their paths eventually crossed with those of free-spirited circus girl Sissy Jupe and victimized weaver Stephen Blackpool, Gradgrind is ultimately compelled to acknowledge the significance of the human heart in an age dominated by materialism and technology.
Bleak House
With an Introduction and Notes by Doreen Roberts, University of Kent at Canterbury Bleak House is one of Dickens’ finest achievements, establishing his reputation as a serious and mature novelist, as well as a brilliant comic writer. It is at once a complex mystery story that fully engages the reader in the work of detection, and an unforgettable indictment of an indifferent society. Its representations of a great city’s underworld, and of the law’s corruption and delay, draw upon the author’s personal knowledge and experience. But it is his symbolic art that projects these things in a vision that embraces black comedy, cosmic farce, and tragic ruin. In a unique creative experiment, Dickens divides the narrative between his heroine, Esther Summerson, who is psychologically interesting in her own right, and an unnamed narrator whose perspective both complements and challenges hers.
Middlemarch
George Eliot’s novel, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, explores a fictional nineteenth-century Midlands town in the midst of modern changes. The proposed Reform Bill promises political change; the building of railroads alters both the physical and cultural landscape; new scientific approaches to medicine incite public division; and scandal lurks behind respectability. The quiet drama of ordinary lives and flawed choices are played out in the complexly portrayed central characters of the novel—the idealistic Dorothea Brooke; the ambitious Dr. Lydgate; the spendthrift Fred Vincy; and the steadfast Mary Garth. The appearance of two outsiders further disrupts the town’s equilibrium—Will Ladislaw, the spirited nephew of Dorothea’s husband, the Rev. Edward Casaubon, and the sinister John Raffles, who threatens to expose the hidden past of one of the town’s elite. Middlemarch displays George Eliot’s clear-eyed yet humane understanding of characters caught up in the mysterious unfolding of self-knowledge. This Penguin Classics edition uses the second edition of 1874 and features an introduction and notes by Eliot-biographer Rosemary Ashton. In her introduction, Ashton discusses themes of social change in Middlemarch, and examines the novel as an imaginative embodiment of Eliot’s humanist beliefs.
A Tale of Two Cities
A Tale of Two Cities is designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille the aging Dr Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a disreputable but brilliant English lawyer, become enmeshed through their love for Lucie Manette. From the tranquil lanes of London, they are all drawn against their will to the vengeful, bloodstained streets of Paris at the height of the Reign of Terror and soon fall under the lethal shadow of La Guillotine.
These delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colorful, and tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. They are part of Penguin’s beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, which the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith designed. When Jonathan Harker travels to Transylvania at the request of Count Dracula to assist him with purchasing a house in London, he makes a number of horrifying discoveries about his client. Almost immediately after this, a number of strange occurrences take place in England: a ship that was apparently unmanned sinks in the waters off the coast of Whitby; a young woman finds strange puncture marks on her neck; an inmate of a mental institution rants and raves about the ‘Master’ and his impending arrival; and so on. Bram Stoker is credited with creating one of the most iconic works in the horror genre with his novel Dracula. Not only does the novel brilliantly evoke a nightmare world of vampires and vampire hunters, but it also shines a light on the shadowy corners of Victorian sexuality and desire.
Gulliver’s Travels
Part of Penguin’s beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. In Gulliver’s Travels, shipwrecked and cast adrift, Lemuel Gulliver wakes to find himself on Lilliput, an island inhabited by little people, whose height makes their quarrels over fashion and fame seem ridiculous. His subsequent encounters – with the crude giants of Brobdingnag, the philosophical Houyhnhnms and brutish Yahoos – give Gulliver new, bitter insights into human behaviour. Swift’s savage satire views mankind in a distorted hall of mirrors as a diminished, magnified and finally bestial species, presenting us with an uncompromising reflection of ourselves.
These exquisite and collectible editions are published as a part of Penguin’s beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series. Designed by the multi-award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, the series features editions that are bound in high-quality, colorful, and tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. Inferno depicts a harsh underworld in which desperate figures are condemned to eternal damnation for committing one or more of the seven deadly sins. This depiction of the underworld is a description of Dante’s descent into Hell in the middle of his life, with Virgil serving as his guide. Dante meets other damned souls as he travels downward through nine concentric circles of increasingly excruciating torture. These souls include the pagan Aeneas, the liar Odysseus, the suicidal Cleopatra, and Dante’s own political enemies, who are damned for their deceit. In the end, the poet will have to travel with Virgil to the most profound level there is, and they will be led there by sneering demons because the only way for him to comprehend the gravity of the situation is to have a face-to-face encounter with Satan himself, deep within the bowels of Hell.
These exquisite and collectible editions are published as a part of Penguin’s beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series. Designed by the multi-award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, the series features editions that are bound in high-quality, colorful, and tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. The normally solitary Thomas Carlyle was said to have been “seized with a perfect convulsion of hospitality” after reading A Christmas Carol, and he proceeded to host not just one but two Christmas dinner parties as a result. It’s possible that the story’s influence wasn’t always as profound as it is now, but together with Dickens’s other Christmas works, it’s had a long-lasting and significant impact on how we think about the Christmas spirit and how the holiday should be used as a time for celebration, charity, and remembering the past.
These exquisite and collectible editions are published as a part of Penguin’s beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series. Designed by the multi-award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, the series features editions that are bound in high-quality, colorful, and tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. By the time this collection of Shakespeare’s poems was published for the first time in 1609, the famous author had already penned the majority of the plays that brought him his fame. The 154 sonnets, of which all but two are addressed to a handsome young man or a treacherous “dark lady,” contain some of the most exquisite and eerie poetry that has ever been written. The sonnets deal with timeless topics such as love and betrayal, memory and mortality, and the devastation caused by time. A Lover’s Complaint, which was originally published alongside the sonnets, is also included in this collection. In it, a young woman is overheard bemoaning the betrayal she suffered at the hands of a heartless seducer.
These exquisite and collectible editions are published as a part of Penguin’s beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series. Designed by the multi-award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, the series features editions that are bound in high-quality, colorful, and tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. When it was first published, the tale of Oliver, an orphan who escapes from the workhouse only to find himself taken in by a group of thieves, shocked readers. Dickens’s story about childhood innocence is threatened by evil depicts the seedy criminal underworld of a London that is populated by vivid and memorable characters, such as the master criminal Fagin, the artful Dodger, the menacing Bill Sikes, and the prostitute Nancy. Dickens created an entirely new kind of fiction by combining Gothic Romance, the Newgate Novel, and popular melodrama elements. This new kind of fiction was scathing in its indictment of a cruel society and was pervaded by an unforgettable sense of menace and mystery.
