Oxford University Press (OUP)has relaunched its paperback World’s Classics series, a handsome and sturdy set of the best of Europe’s voluminous literature (with some American and Asian works thrown in, too).
The titles reach back to Mesopotamia thousands of years ago and forward to James Joyce’s Ulysses. The series features sacred texts such as the Bhagavad Gita and the Bible, canonic pillars such as Shakespeare’s plays, and translations from Russian, French, German and more.
For the new series, OUP has generated new translations and critical editions with introductions and notes by leading scholars. The books are also competitively priced, the cheapest pegged at R25 or so.
The original World’s Classics series was launched (as a set of hardcovers) in 1901 by Grant Richards. Despite the books’ popularity, he went bankrupt in 1905 and OUP took the series over. The number of World’s Classics titles went from Richards’s 66 up to 600.
In the 1980 the series was launched in paperback. Now the Oxford World’s Classics have been updated once more, bringing the scholarly together with pleasing design and sturdy materials.
n You can win a set of five volumes of the Oxford World’s Classics series. See these pages next week.