39 Matching Annotations
  1. Jun 2024
    1. I like the Penguins just fine, and have to confess to enjoying the look of their matte-blank ranks on a shelf when stood all together. I wish they were still priced at the same as a pack of cigarettes, but I guess Allen Lane couldn't have predicted the sorry state of our world. As far as alternatives go, the Oxford World's Classics imprint offers comparable breadth and (often) superior critical material. They're also willing to print interesting variants; one example of this may be found in their offering of both the widely-known 1831 single-volume edition and the original 1818 edition, which contains significant differences. Two other imprints for which to watch out: The Norton Critical Editions are distinctive in all their colourful, oversized splendour, but they offer some of the best value for money if you're seeking an edition of a classic work that also includes a host of useful supplemental documents, critical writings, timelines, and other things that may be of use to those seeking a wider context. This can admittedly get a bit ridiculous in its scope (though I wouldn't have it any other way; the Norton edition of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darknessis around 500 pages long, for instance, with maybe a fifth of that being accounted for by the novella itself. Similarly to the above, the Broadview editions (put out by a Canadian company of the same name) tend to have extremely in-depth supplementary materials. They're also known for offering just as serious and useful editions of comparatively obscure works as they are for well-known classics.

      Publishers that are good in general, for older material: * Penguin Classics * Oxford World Classics * Norton Critical Editions * Broadview Editions

    2. Awesome! I will look into Oxford and the New York Review of Books lines. I have a couple Norton Critical books from school, (one of which is Heart of Darkness, as a matter of fact) and they are crazy good if you are looking for a wide slice of criticism and analysis (thus the critical edition moniker, I guess). For me though, it's really too much for a book you just want to read. I like informative introductions and frequent notes on the personal or literary context (these were great for Monte Cristo), but any more than that begins to weigh things down.

      Some publishers can be too much for certain works (depending on the goal for reading)

  2. Dec 2023
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  4. Aug 2023
    1. https://latin.packhum.org/

      This website contains essentially all Latin literary texts written before A.D. 200, as well as some texts selected from later antiquity.

    1. It is not quite a five-foot shelf: 1 make it four feet eight-and-a-half — standard railroad gauge.

      the five-foot shelf reference is to the Harvard Classics competitor

  5. Jul 2023
    1. “Notes from Underground” now sells eight thousand copies a year, “Crime and Punishment” twelve thousand, “The Brothers Karamazov” fourteen thousand, “Anna Karenina” twenty thousand.

      Some useful numbers from 2005 on classic book sales of particular titles.

  6. Apr 2023
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  8. Nov 2022
  9. Oct 2022
    1. Laudator Temporis Acti

      https://laudatortemporisacti.blogspot.com/

      Michael Gilleland is an antediluvian, bibliomaniac, and curmudgeon.

      The title of the blog and Gilleland's calling himself a curmudgeon calls to mind Horace...

  10. Sep 2022
    1. A clas-sic, Italo Calvino wrote, is a work which relegates the noiseof the present to a background hum—but without renderingthat hum inaudible.

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    Annotators

  11. Jun 2022
    1. certain sub-currents in their thought. One being the proposition that the original (or translated) texts of the most influential Western books are vastly superior material to study for serious minds than are textbooks that merely give pre-digested (often mis-digested) assessments of the ideas contained therein.

      Are some of the classic texts better than more advanced digested texts because they form the building blocks of our thought and society?

      Are we training thinkers or doers?

  12. May 2022
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  16. Dec 2019
    1. ‘I have ten thousand florins a year without Greek, I eat heartily without Greek.’

      This passage comes from Oliver Goldsmith's (1730-1774) novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), and seems to ask whether education ought to be directed squarely towards vocational training (as clear from Clerval's father's opinion), or whether learning the classical languages or literature (or "the Greeks") is valuable in itself.

  17. Sep 2018
    1. Classics Book Club

      If you are interested in reading Classic books you can join r/ClassicsBookClub on reddit where we will be hosting groups reads and discussions.

  18. May 2017
  19. Mar 2017
  20. Feb 2017
    1. relic of the outmoded classical curriculumT and in olhcrs it was absorbed into the study of classics.

      Rather ironic considering how many ignored the classics.

    1. , including some works in Latin am.I Greek. Composition in the vernacular replaced Latin composition throughout the Continent, and Latin dis~ appeared almost completely from the public primary schools.
    2. They retain enough references to the heroes of the classical tradition and enough illustrations translated from great Greek and Latin works to provide an overview for scholars not versed in the originals

      Like watching the Wishbone version?

    1. Astell recommended that women study virtually every subject that men studied ex-cept for classical languages

      Odd...

      Just about one hundred years later, Mary Wollstonecraft publishes "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman." In addition to the denial of women from certain, albeit many, areas of discourse, she is also angered that there is no aim, no "simple principle" as she puts it, for women to strive for.

      Odd because in this age, wouldn't "male principles" derive mainly from the classical texts?