The Bookseller.com

2nd December 2008

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Penguin has its final Great Ideas

08.05.08 Benedicte Page

Penguin will launch a third and final tranche of its Great Ideas series in August. The 20 titles, coming as £4.99 A-format paperbacks, will include works by Camus, Plutarch, Trotsky and Nietzsche.

Penguin Classics publisher Adam Freudenheim said the latest collection would be typically eclectic. "Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction has never been published before in Penguin Classics, it's a new translation, and it's one of the best essays of the 20th century," he said.

Freudenheim also highlighted Robert Burton's Some Anatomies of Melancholy and Adam Smith's The Invisible Hand. "The idea behind the series was to include individual great works but also to look at some long works which are difficult as a whole—Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy is a massive tome and almost no one reads it, but an extract is very satisfying."

Freudenheim predicted that the latest line-up would perform well because, as with the first set of Great Ideas, Great Journeys and Great Loves series, it contains names with a broad appeal, such as Freud and Tolstoy. He also confirmed that this summer's 20 would probably complete the set: "Sixty feels like a lot of great ideas, and if you went beyond that, you would begin to be scraping the barrel."

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