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

[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".)