Penguin Random House launched their maiden Classics Festival, which commenced on November 1, set to continue till November 30, in India. It is spread across five cities—Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Kolkata and Chennai. THE WEEK caught up with Henry Eliot, creative director of Penguin Classics, who has just launched his book—The Penguin Classics Book: A Readers Companion to the Penguin Classics Series. He spoke about what makes a classic, reading trends, quirky writers, and their extraordinary minds and lives.
How did the idea of Penguin Random House India’s Classics festival come about?
I have to give all the credit to Penguin Delhi, who had this vision to bring all the wonderful titles to one place. It seemed like an ambitious project, but when they contacted bookshops to see if they’d be interested, the response was fantastic. So, they found five bookshops around the country, one in each major city. They agreed to take books off the shelves, and fill part of the bookshop with the entire Penguin Classics, which is a real feat given that there are around 3,000 of them. They have been promoting it, and holding events in the stores.
What has the response been like?
Certainly, the response has been fantastic. In those bookshops that I visited, and even while I have been in the shop, I have seen lots of people buying classics. Many have come to the events where I talked about classics. There seems to be a real interest in what makes a classic, how they remain a classic, and how relevant they are today. So, people have many questions about that. The response has been really enthusiastic.
What have you been talking about at the events? What is it that makes a classic?
It is quite a tricky question. In a way, the word ‘classic’ is used so much, and for so many different things, it is almost meaningless. But, if I think about what I look for in a classic, I go beyond the best. For me, it comes down to three main criteria. First, there has to be literary quality. It has to feel like it is well written, and that’s a very subjective measure. But I think there’s often a consensus when something is well-crafted. Certainly, I think, it needs to have made some kind of a historical impact, some historical significance, when it appeared. Maybe it was very important to a certain culture, or it was a great bestseller, or it changed the way literature was going in some way. Thirdly, I think it needs to have some form of enduring reputation. People still need to be reading it, talking about it, and studying it. Above all, there is this idea that a classic should speak to us today, even if you need to get over the hurdles of language or the historical context. Once you’re over the hurdles, it needs to connect with you, and expand your understanding of what it means to be human. I think as soon as a book stops doing that, it stops becoming a work of literature, and becomes a historical document. It is no longer alive. It is stuck in time. So, when I am looking for classics, I am always looking for that spark of life, whether it can still speak to us today.
You’re offering a wide variety of subjects to your readers. What do you see the global reader leaning towards?
I think there are different types of classics which appeal to readers at different times, and I think people go back to the classics to make sense of the times. So, it was interesting that last year when Trump came into power in the [United] States, we saw a surge in sales for dystopian novels. So, we got much higher sales for 1984 by George Orwell and another book, It Can’t Happen Here, by Sinclaire Lewis, a 20th century American novel about a populist right wing politician, or rather a celebrity, who becomes the president of the United States. It is uncanny because it almost exactly describes what is happening now in the States. So, I think people do turn back to the classics at times of uncertainty. It is interesting that the very first Penguin Classic was Homer’s Odyssey, translated by this man in the 1940’s called E.V. Rieu. Penguin Classics didn’t exist at the time, and he translated just for fun. He did it to pass the time, while sitting on the roof in London during the blitz; bombs were dropping, and he was positioned as a fire watchman. He said that he went back to Homer because he saw him as the supreme realist in these unreal times. So, Penguin Classics began with someone kind of looking back to the classics for the strength to get through the present.
Tell us about your book and how that came about?
When I joined Penguin Classics, part of my brief was to think about new ways to present the list and to enthuse new people about the list. One of the things that struck me was that there wasn’t an easy way for the reader to discover all the titles. Because there were so many of them, I felt like it was actually difficult for one person to discover a new title that way. Through a number of conversations, we talked about different ways of doing it. I ended up working on this book, which is a kind of companion to the list. The idea behind it was to give people the entire list in one package. So, I hope it will give people the confidence to open the book and read about the different titles that they might be interested in. Hopefully, it will help them build reading lists and explore the classics. The book itself is a little piece of every title, and every author, structured roughly chronologically and broken down geographically as well. What I tried to do is be a bit irreverent, a bit humourous, and engaging at all times.
From deciding to do it, it took about a year to write it. Then, it took about another year to design, because once I had written it, we had to grapple with it and wrangle it down into a book shape. The designer was Mathew Young, a colleague of mine in London. It was such a huge job to fit all these books into these pages. From coming up with the idea, it took about two years to finish it.
