Anyone else have a fondness for these books, which I think of as being from the 1970s into early 1980s?QUOTE]
No -- the English Library books were published from the mid-Sixties to the early 1980s, it appears. I looked over my batch (41 titles).
About the oldest one that I own is a late-Sixties New Grub Street (Gissing) that has a back cover blurb stating Penguin's intention to create a series that could "take its place alongside the Penguin Classics."
The latter, at that time, had black spines and was, I believe, entirely made up of famous works in translation. "English" works such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Canterbury Tales that could no longer be read, except by people with scholarly training, in the original were translated and appeared in the Classics series (not in the later English Library), but most of the Classics were in languages such as Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, medieval Icelandic (a fine little saga sub-series), etc.
The English Library was "classics in modern English," I take it -- "modern English" being inclusive enough to include a lightly modernized text of Malory's Morte d'Arthur (2 volumes). But the Library included books by non-English authors. My copy of The New Grub Street lists authors who have appeared "so far," not only including English writers such as Dickens and George Eliot, but Americans such as Melville.
The "prospectus" I've been quoting contains a frank statement: "the best work to have appeared in English since the fifteenth century."
That evaluative element has been phased out with the subsumption of the English Library in the Penguin Classics and the Classics' revisioning as a list reflecting academic trends (or fads) and, perhaps, a notion that mere longevity secures a work "classic" status. For example, I wouldn't enroll Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars in the same list of classics that includes a book published just a few years previously, Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, though I have enjoyed both books (the former at about age 15; alas; I didn't find it finishable this year). I do like the idea of "popular classics" such as Princess being issued with helpful notes.
At any rate, though, I thought there might be fans of the Penguin English Library who'd enjoy commenting here. Are there any actual completist collectors out there? I mentioned my resolution not to go that way. But if anyone has, well, are there any particularly scarce titles? Etc.
