Everyman's Library (Original Series) -- Predecessor of Penguin Classics

[Vince W]

You have a collector's item there, because that's the Kirby translation that revolutionized J. R. R. Tolkien's imaginative world.

I didn't know that. I knew Tolkien had read and studied the Kalevala, but not that it was that translation. Thanks for the info Ex.

 

[Extollager]

I'll quote from the battered dustwrapper of Vol. 1 (of two) of the old Everyman edition of Pepys's Diary. This printing dates to 1925.

----"The true university in these days," said Carlyle, "is a collection of books." The main idea of this series is to make it easy for every one to obtain such a collection, and get at small cost all that is good, all that has worn well in English Literature. It will not offer only the classic authors, it will reprint the Victorians with the Elizabethans, comparatively new authors with the old famous ones, and books for pure pleasure as well as for wisdom and knowledge.

Arranged in sections, as of History, Philosophy, Belles-Lettres, and so forth, Everyman's Library makes clear the relations of one kind of book to another, shows the debt of a romance like "Ivanhoe" to a romantic historian like "Froissart," or sets the poets side by side with a book of creative criticism like Coleridge's "Biographia Literaria." Thus for a few pounds, the reader may have a whole bookshelf of the immortals; for a comparatively small expenditure a man may be intellectually rich for life.-----

 

[Extollager]

W. G. Sebald's Everymans. From Saturn's Moons: W. G. Sebald--A Handbook. Sebald was author of The Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz, After Nature, The Emigrants, Vertigo, etc.

 

[Astro Pen]

By strange coincidence I am currently reading the Everyman Rousseau Confessions volume 1 1941 reprint
A very plain edition, presumably wartime utility.