OMFG.

[rivka]

The Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection.

From Edwin A. Abottt to Emile Zola, the 1,082 titles in the Penguin Classics Complete Library total nearly half a million pages--laid end to end they would hit the 52 mile mark. Approximately 700 pounds in weight, the titles would tower 828 feet if you stacked them lengthwise atop each other--almost as tall as the Empire State Building. But don't worry, a nice set of bookshelves will hold them side-by-side just fine.

I want this in ways that make no sense at all. I feel desire in the pit of my stomach when I look at the title list, when I think about running my hands over all those smooth covers. I'm sure that my local library has every one of these books, and I could check them out one by one in an inexpensive and reasonable fashion. But I want them. I want to have them. I want to have that limitless sense of possibility when I walk into my library, and by the way, I want a library to put these books in. Oh my God.

Someone who did buy it took a picture for Amazon. Just look at that. Just look.

(Thanks to epi_lj, I guess.)

Comments

[melebeth]

I mirror your feelings completely.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I actually salivated. I am not especially proud of this.

[melebeth]

Hee. Whores for literature 'R Us

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

Then you can imagine how I felt when I read that the Encyclopedia Brittannica would no longer be produced in paper format. Waaaagh!

[rolypolypony.livejournal.com]

*drool*

[maureenkspeller.livejournal.com]

I am having a very bad attack of want and book lust, especially after looking at the picture too. I am drooling ... even though I probably already own a good percentage of them already. It's the neatness of the shelves, the pristine condition of the books ... it's art.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

One of the Amazon reviewers talks about the intense pleasure she had unpacking the crates, checking all of the books off against the list, and shelving them. Yeah.

[lietya.livejournal.com]

Ohhhh.... *lusts* And one can save $5000 by buying them from Amazon! :)

I probably have a big chunk of them myself, but the beauty of the matched set is magnificent.

[klwalton.livejournal.com]

I love the bit on the page that says, "Was this image helpful?"

Um, NO, it wasn't! It makes me want them even more and that's just ridiculous because I haven't got a library nor anyplace to keep all those books, my bookshelves are overflowing as it is, and if I don't stop piling books up around here soon I'm going to become so lost that they'll find nothing of me but my bleached bones buried under yet another pile of books I had no shelf space for!!

Ahem.

In other words, I hear you.

[aloha-moira.livejournal.com]

ohhhhh. *covets*

(It's just like the scene in 'Beauty and the Beast' where Belle sees the library in the castle for the first time... now, if only I had time to read all of them...)

[journeywoman.livejournal.com]

There should be a commandment about that. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's books. Because the way I feel after seeing that photo has got to be some sort of sin.

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

::lust::

[kightp.livejournal.com]

I'm not going to clicko that link. Notnotnot. I have plenty of books, and I can barely read these days (damned bifocals). Not clicking, nosiree, not me.

However, I feel your pain. I've been feeling it regularly ever since 1979, when the Library of America (http://www.loa.org/) project released its first beautiful, authoritative editions of works by American writers. Such handsome, handsome books; such amazing writing.

[orangemike.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, aren't they though! And the selections is delightfully eclectic. No Heinlein yet, though.

[kightp.livejournal.com]

Iconoclast me, I wouldn't put Heinlein in that company.

[geekymary.livejournal.com]

And they even SHELVE it for you!

I'm not helping, am I?

[marith.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes. *stares covetously*

Except...actually I don't know if I would want them all with matching spines. It used to be nice to lie in bed and let my eyes roam over the bookshelves, sleepily picking out landmarks. The brown patch at the top is probably Austen, and in the middle are the colorful blobs of big fat f/sf novels by authors whose names begin with L and M. S is easy to find because of all those little white $2 editions of Shakespeare plays, and so forth.

(Now I really miss having all the books in the bedroom. Dang.)

[marith.livejournal.com]

Also, I feel a bit like Opus. Penguin lust.

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

free shipping! :)

[bsquad.livejournal.com]

Based on my current rate, if I started reading now, it would only take about 15 years to read them all (providing I read nothing else in between.)

And yet, I still want it in an intense and unnatural way.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

I was thinking about a book a week. Sometimes that would leave me time to read a non-Penguin book as well - it's not going to take me a week to re-read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - but then, other weeks would see me trying to finish something like War and Peace. Hmm.

Averaging a book a week would take 21 years.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

When you get to _Tom Sawyer_, would it be time to read it out loud to Alex? A book a week sounds about right, on top of everything else.

[cynthia1960.livejournal.com]

Oh. My. Goddess. Why can't I win the damn lottery and buy a house big enough to hold all my books (with this set added!). Or, get some sort of variant of the Discworld Library to hold all the books in a separate dimension and have on-demand access to them.

Yeah, right. Reality bites.

Unghng

[ailbhe]

*pant*

[kfitzwarin.livejournal.com]

Must. Have. Books.

(Although like several other comments have mentioned, I probably already have a big chunk of these. But ooooh.)

[toadnae.livejournal.com]

*whimper* It was bad enough when I worked for a company that had just been bought by Pearson, and they hadn't gotten our employee discount worked out yet. Oh gods I covet ....

[electricland.livejournal.com]

Oh my, that looks lovely.

And hey! Free shipping!

[laurent-atl.livejournal.com]

i was about to comment that it is not even that expensive. 7000 dollars is what you'd save by giving up on the fancy prius and driving a corolla.

[laurent-atl.livejournal.com]

would you really want paperbacks, though, if you were building a dream library? my fantasy involves the full collection of the bilbliotheque de la pleiade ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblioth%C3%A8que_de_la_Pl%C3%A9iade), with the soft leather binding and the gold lettering on the spine, but i do not know if you can even buy the whole thing. I suspect some titles are out of print.

[witling.livejournal.com]

Wow. That's incredible. It makes me smile to see it.

Penguin is a very cool publisher, it's true.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I've got lots(*) of them, and I don't especially like all of their translators. The Penguin Classics Early Irish Myths and Legends, Jeffrey Gantz, is generally known as "Boring Irish Myths and Legends". The person other than de Selincourt who translated Livy is unreadable. Their Joinville and Villhaudoin translations are really clunky. Their Ammianus translation is so clunky I bought the Loeb. Also, their introductions to their volumes of Trollope suck even more than everyone else's introductions to Trollope.

(* I stopped counting at a eighty-four because I kept missing them and finding them and I got lost, because while you'd think black spines were easy to see, they're not as easy as I thought. More than a hundred. Not as many as everything. Maybe two hundred.)

Anyway, I like having eclectic shelves with different coloured spines. (When I moved, one of my alphabetical boxes of books was "Caesar to Cherryh".)

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

I have had a fantasy since I was a little girl of owning a house with a library.

[bunyip.livejournal.com]

*whimper*

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Does nothing for me. Sorry.

B

[rivka.livejournal.com]

'Sokay, we can stick to talking about food and politics.

[tammylc.livejournal.com]

Phew - I thought I was the only one who didn't have book lust.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

I just look at them and think: "Where would I put them?"

The whole point of libraries is that they store books for you until you need them.

B

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

adventureaddict passed it along to me and in his e-mail noted that the books require 77 linear feet of shelf space and weigh 750lbs. :) I'm not sure where he got that information, although it's probably in the Amazon page somewhere.

[tchemgrrl.livejournal.com]

Ahhh! It's back! That was on my wishlist for a long time (because what if I have some anonymous benefactor with 8000$ burning a hole in their pockets?) but then it disappeared for some reason--maybe they'd just updated the list.

When I have a real house, it's going to have a library, and then I'll save up for it. Seriously.