Voh bhooli dastaan . . . .

Three months ago, I wrote about Radiant Reader(s), the texts that I read in English Literature classes from Class III to about Class VI or VII, exactly and approximately. And the response I got was from a couple of Indians. Upon seeing that, I thought, hmmm, here is something else that some Pakistanis and Indians share, and which might bring us to a civil conversation.

I remember bits and pieces within some of the Radiant Readers. I remember the colors in some kind of order, red, blue, green, orange (or was orange before green? akh!). Khair, as I said in the previous piece, if anyone can  remind me what The Ungrateful Larch was about, I will appreciate you forever!

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As some of you already may have brilliantly deducted, I am a child of the sixties and seventies. One day, while at the library, I was thinking about the old Penguin hardcovers from that time, and earlier. I turned to the internet in hopes of finding something that approximated the ones I had, or borrowed, but the usually helpful web was not so much this time around.

Owning a Penguin hardcover was something of a beauty, and a rarity as they were not inexpensive. I had five of them myself. At the front was the title, and the author's name, with interesting artwork, and at the back, a long list of titles available through Penguin Classics. Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility cover had a light brown background, with a sketch of a man and a woman in a buggy (Willoughby and Marianne), and a woman with a white bonnet and parasol. Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies, had this aqua green background with plump babies underwater, perhaps some inhabitants (and bubbles?). Almost always you could connect the art of the cover with the content of the novel.

I wish I had held on to some of my books, but a lot gets lost while moving, and much is left behind when moving from one country to another, as we did in 1979.

Geoff Dyer, in the NYT:

There is a widespread nostalgic fondness for the first Penguins, with their bands of color that made every book look the same within whichever category of writing — green for crime, purple for . . . something else? The same is true of the early Modern Classics featuring drawings, but for someone of my age — born 1958, buying and reading from the mid-1970s — these editions were the stuff of used-book stores. They all looked pretty much the same: old, dreary and therefore oxymoronically unmodern. Whereas the 1970s livery with titles and authors’ names in sharply discreet Helvetica was the pristine look of modernity — sometimes modernism — itself.

You can read the entire article, here.