Penguin 60s information

To celebrate its 60th anniversary circa 1995, Penguin Books released several boxed sets of "Penguin 60s", miniature books about sixty pages in length. The books were also sold individually.

The main set, with black spines, (ISBN 0140952721, ISBN 978-0-14-095272-8) contained 60 "classic" works. The UK set with orange spines (ISBN 0140951792 / ISBN 978-0-14-095179-0) focused on 20th century or contemporary writers and contained 60 books. A similar set of 60 orange spine books was released for the US market with 13 books in common with the UK set. Smaller, ten item sets focusing on biography/autobiography, travel and cookery were also issued. A children's set (ISBN 0140953361) was released, consisting of 30 volumes.

Further books in the series were planned but appear to have been cancelled. Thirty Obituaries of Wisden selected by Matthew Engel (ISBN 0146002482, ISBN 978-0-14-600248-9) was published but did not appear in any of the other sets of books. Ten orange spine books were released as a limited edition boxed set sold through Blackwell's bookshops in the UK (ISBN 0140954139) with Stephen King's Umney's Last Case the only title appearing in the US orange spine editions. The other nine titles in the Blackwells set were unique titles that did not appear in the other sets (Surprised by Summer by David Lodge, Postcards from Summer by Peter Mayle, Lizzie Borden by Angela Carter, The Girl Who Loved Graveyards by P.D. James, Expulsion from Paradise by Howard Jacobson, Meeting Bilal by Esther Freud, The Rock of Crack as Big as the Ritz by Will Self, The Pocket Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins and Scenes from the Dwarf by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor). Another 19 titles appear to have been planned as they are listed at the back of the biography and travel editions but do not appear to have been published.

The American orange spine set and British orange spine set only had 13 books that were in common. They are:

1. Hans Christian Andersen – The Emperor's New Clothes
2. Anton Chekov – The Black Monk and Peasants
3. Roald Dahl – Lamb to the Slaughter and Other Stories
4. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – The Man with the Twisted Lip and The Adventure of the Devil's Foot
5. Graham Greene – Under the Garden
6. Rudyard Kipling – Baa, Baa, Black Sheep and The Gardener
7. Gabriel García Márquez – Bon Voyage, Mr President and Other Stories
8. Herman Melville – Bartleby and The Lightning-rod Man
9. Michel De Montaigne – Four Essays
10. John Mortimer – Rumpole and the Younger Generation
11. Edgar Allan Poe – The Pit and the Pendulum and Other Stories
12. Edith Wharton – Madame de Treymes
13. Oscar Wilde – The Happy Prince and Other Stories