Never had a problem with penguin classics. What's the big deal here? Text is never smudged, paper is fine...

Never had a problem with penguin classics. What's the big deal here? Text is never smudged, paper is fine, I can admit that there's a little spine trouble... but either than that these seem like fine paperbacks.

They're not supposed to be high quality. Penguin haters miss the point. They're for marking up for assignments.

Tryhards, edgefags and hipsters. Literally just that.

Same with Wordsworth.

Many of the translations are perfectly fine but pseudes on this board want to be pedantic about translations they'll never read.

But they really aren't low quality. They seem fine overall.
Tryhards hate them or own them

Penguin editions are total garbage.

>weeks before birthday
>give my mother hints that I'd like to read Dubliners
>say it's my birthday so she can afford to buy me a good edition and not a cheap paperback
>spend the nest few weeks talking about how magnificent an author Joyce is
>Birthday
>mother shows me a present in the shape of a nice hardcover book
>feel good about this, proud of my mother for the first time in my life
>as soon as she hands me the book, all that goes away
>feel under the wrappings a shitty floopy paperback
>open it and see it's a fucking Penguin edition
>sternly tell mother that Everyman editions are the books that are aesthetically beautiful and long lasting
>she keeps telling me that my present is a centennial edition and that the artwork looks pretty, as if that makes it better
>tell her this Penguin piece of shit will fall apart after only a few rereadings
>demonstrate my point by opening and closing the poorly made Penguin edition just a few times
>it rips apart really easily and turns into a pathetic pile of paper on the floor
>tfw she won't buy me the Everyman version because I've been acting bad

She told me I could have just made an exchange if I didn't "destroy" the book I had, but I don't want another poor reader to suffer.

Penguin editions are great quality paperbacks... honestly

I haven't really heard anyone talk shit about Penguin Classics, but I assume edgelords hate them because they're popular (which they are because they are good)

Penguin classics are great

theres nothing wrong with them, its just some people are really concerned about how their books look on a shelf (ive been guilty of this in my youth too)

its collector mentality bleedover from videogames imo.

my mummy gets me folio society books for holidays

They are great though

...

i love this pasta

Does anyone else genuinely like them? They're great quality most of the time. Occasionally you get a bad one but it's mostly good makes.

I'm pretty sure this is just bait, but I can't help but believe that there are autists out there who actually think and behave like this.

Veeky Forums is the only place I've seen people criticise penguin classics. Veeky Forums also has a lot of edgy contrarian posters. I think you can see where I'm going with this.

I don't care for the font and format of my Penguin edition of Oblomov, but I have at least a few dozen other Penguin books that I have no problems with.

Penguin is generally fine, that copy of Petersburg there is the best translation with the best end notes btw.

>I can admit that there's a little spine trouble...

Go. To. Hell.

9th Circle. In the ice.

With your good friend, Satan.

what?

Anyone who hates penguin classics is a repressed homosexual and probably sociopath

I really like Penguin classics, and I've never understood what the beef with them is. I'm picky about cover art and Penguins are always a pretty safe bet in that aspect. They're never gaudy or misrepresentative of the book's content. The books tend to feel good physically too. Nice mass and page density, and the covers are smooth. Never any deckled edges. I could understand if you want to gripe about the choice of translators in some of them, but otherwise there is absolutely nothing worth hating about them.

I don't really get the hate for Penguin Classics. Their notes and introductions are decent, although I do wish they did footnotes instead. It's pretty annoying that I have to thumb to the back whenever there is a reference when reading Gorgias. Yes, they do commission literally who translators, but nobody cares about translations outside of epic poetry.

People are calling them shit because the quality of the material you fucking morons

what are you trying to say?

You have 10 seconds to name a better paperback classics publisher.

dover

If you only want translations in the public domain (i. e., old, and not taking advantage of up to date texts and research), maybe. And I am not a Dover-hater - I own quite a few of them (most recently their reprint of the old Loeb of Seneca's Epistulae Morales) - but they are simply not in the same market as Penguin and OWC.

better quality printings though

patrician choice classics are longman editions. its a shame there arent more of them.

Anyone who complains about a books cover or publisher, but not about the translation, Is a child molester

depending on the binding, they can be hit or miss. i think they've stopped doing the silver spined classics that used get fucked up and leave bits of silver like glitter herpes everywhere, and their black spined classics are better in some runs than others (i have ones where the spine was glued into a crease)

the bigger problem is that some of their copy is completely fucked. Veeky Forums loves pynchon and one of their biggest copy fuck ups involved removing a chapter or so from an anniversary edition of his. an *anniversary* edition, where all they need to change is the fucking cover, not the copy. they also fucked the copy of D&G's anti-oedipus. most of their copy doesn't have errors like those, but if you wanted to pick two books to completely fail to do your job on and get Veeky Forums to notice, they couldn't have hand picked them better.

I'll go for quality of content over production quality, especially in paperbacks (which are, of their very nature, usually ephemeral),

The only advantage any of my Dovers have is generally clearer print; and that's only because they are recently set editions of public domain texts. But several are printed horribly tight to the margin; and one not only suffers from that, but also has an inferior binding, such that the page is wavy against the spine. (ISBN 048644791X / 9780486447919 I bought that copy only because complete translations of Plato's Laws are not abundant.)

They're bad so I never buy from them, made in China including the translations. Only university presses usually. I didn't pick a barista degree like English, so every book on my shelf actually matters. Your own wiki tells you to avoid Penguin; by God, I'm laughing in my undies right now.

1/10

>Only university presses usually.

Only a UP (Princeton, in this case) could produce the glorious quality of Daryl Hine's Puerilities (ISBN 0691088209), a translation of Book 12 of the Greek Anthology, in which the introduction manages to mangle "Apollonius Rhodius" into "Apologies Rhodes" on p. xvii, among other howlers.

Why would you read Greek Anthology from anywhere other than Loeb, though. Harvard UP has the definitive translations for everything Greek and Latin. Penguin's will never be better than a UP.

Loebs vary enormously in quality, and some - partly because of the sheer size of the LCL - remain very out of date (although some of the old ones, like Duff's Lucan, or Frazer's Apollodorus, still hold their own, being outstanding to begin with). Many Loebs (like even some recent OWCs) translate poetry with prose (e. g., in post-2000 Loebs, Race's Apollonius Rhodius, and Shackleton Bailey's Statius); and in any event, since translation is essentially extended commentary, using various translations is always a good idea. For widely translated authors, the Loebs will often be serviceable, but by no means the best translations, either as scholarship, or as literature.

Imprint is not meaningless, but fetishizing HUP, or any publisher, is to turn off the critical sense. Especially when it comes to the Greek and Latin classics, Penguin and OWC have produced important, good translations by major scholars, and many have much fuller annotation than most Loebs.

>soz rhodes 2dionysian rn
kek that's almost worth buying it for

Shit like this pasta cannot be shared around man, it fucking breaks my heart. Poor mother. I actually feel fucking awful now, like it was me who did it or something. Thanks a lot you fucking pasta posting asswipe.

Oxford World's Classics

Hear, hear

Judging entirely by publisher seems stupid anyway, should be the individual books you judge. Some penguin are great, some are awful, just like most of the publishers like oxford ect that Veeky Forums will recommend

>Apologies Rhodes

Their 2008 run (Shakespeare, Marlowe, etc) is total garbage.

He's saying that you betrayed the company you're shilling for, and that means you will get rimmed by Satan for all eternity.

Patrician book

Same, OP. I own quite a few. Their spines are weak but other than that I have no issues. I suppose it may depend on the translation they offer too though, it's always worthwhile to find the best translation available.

Nah, Wordsworth's covers are genuinely shit and the translations are terrible, hence them being public domain translations. Their older editions of English novels are very good and cost effective though.

Can relate empathanon

can you defend this claim?
There is a translation by Pushkin press by a devoted Bely scholar and there is also an academic translation from the 70s on the later edited edition of Petersburg that Bely but out in the 1920s.

Wordsworth doesn't always use public domain translations. Their 1997 Plato: Symposium and the death of Socrates (ISBN 1853264792) used translations by Tom Griffith, who was series editor at the time. And their 1996 Apuleius (ISBN 1853264601) used the old Loeb version - Gaselee's revision of Adlington - but supplements the passages expurgated by Adlington and Gaselee alike.

This is especially true of long-running series that have changed their focus: the Loebs, for example, started life as cheap, durable editions of the text with translations for a general audience; nowadays, they have a much more ambitious scholarly standard (as shown in the publication of new editions by DR Shackleton Bailey, ML West, Glenn Most, etc.).

>its collector mentality bleedover
this

Is this one okay? Asking for a friend.