I like your point about the Ted Smart box of books, where you question if they are really cult classics or instead, modern classics. This is the sort of comment that you make all the time which I find enlightening because I never would have thought about it unless it was mentioned. Seems like a small point on my part, but it illustrates one of the myriad intangibles that make the Outlaw Bookseller such an outstanding channel, IMHO. Cheers!
When I was about 13 and started to buy and read serious fiction voraciously, Hesse was important to me. Narziss and Goldmund was my favourite novel for a very long time. I've read only a few Waugh novels, most recently Black Mischief; that and Scoop are very very funny. I love Woolf - I've read most of her novels and I've been thinking of picking up a collection of her essays, of which I've read only a few in anthologies. I've been reading more Greene lately: Our Man in Havana and The Third Man are favourite films, and the accompanying novels are brilliant. I recently re-read The Quiet American and Ministry of Fear, and I have Twenty-One Stories on the boil. Very prolific. As for Orwell, I have a copy of 1984 with a forward by Thomas Pynchon. I've read pretty much all of Orwell's work. I often re-read his essays, which I also have on a Kindle - good for dipping into on the bus. The only LP Hartley I've read are his short ghost stories: I have a nice two volume set of those in a slip case, published by the wonderful Tartarus Press. Great selection, although, like you, I'm not sure why some of those are 'cult classics'.
Yes, they're so obviously not 'Cult Classics' in any way. Greene - love 'The Human Factor', 'Our Man In Havana', 'The Quiet American', 'The Power and the Glory', he's always worth reading. Orwell is peerless in my book.
Conrad wanted to write in French but thought he would have a larger audience with English. Brideshead was actually on ITV as was Jewel in the Crown. Not read Waugh but I've heard Vile Bodies & Scoop are two good reads. I vaguely remember Australian TV did a series based on Greene's The Power & the Glory. Lastly the real life shipwreck of Whisky Galore was the S.S. Politician. Never go a chance to dive it but I think in the last decade someone got a bottle from it intact. Pity I can't find a bargain like those 2 sets.
The Go-Between is a wonderful book - well worth reading. It's one of the first books I read (outside school) where I really saw how skilfully symbolism can be used. Astrological signs feature in the story, and they are subtley portrayed when, say, the male lover is introduced to us holding two pails of water (Aquarius), or the female lover wearing a pure white dress (Virgo). The young lad (the go-between of the title) at one point catches the ball in a cricket match, and causes the male lover to be out of the game, thus foreshadowing that he is going to be the cause of his undoing by the climax of the novel. So much to analyze, and such gorgeous use of language.
While I haven’t gotten to Steppenwolf, I have read Hesse’s Siddhartha. I read it back when I was a Sophomore in high school in my English class and it really helped spark my interest in Buddhism as a religion. Reading Siddhartha before reading Zelazny’s Lord of Light two years ago made that reading experience so much better.
I had a similar experience with Hesse. Read them all and loved them. They changed my life/calmed me down/made me a better person. I've been meaning to re-read him, but I'm not sure how 63 year old me will react.
Yes, it's interesting how one changes with regard to books- some remain startlers, others diminish, others improve. As Colin WIlson wrote: " A human being is a process, not a thing," which I guess is taking the 'same river twice' idea further.
I read 'The Day of the Triffids' when I was a teenager and it gave me nightmares (in a good sense)! My wife admires 'Demian'. But now I want to read 'Steppenwolf' as well!
I fondly recall having that edition of The Plague and Steppenwulf. I read The Plague in Paris in June 1999. Ah, the tea soaked Madelaine dissolves in my mouth ... sweet reminiscences ...
There is a tendency with the big corporate publishers to throw things together. Just think- both slipcases are identical size, so books would have been chosen based on length too... 'We need a big one now to fill out the box...'.
@@outlawbookselleroriginal yes, good point. I think there would be other themes that could have been used which would fit the contents though because cult classics does not.. 🤭
Hesse was an author I was quite taken with when I was about 20...ignoring the fact that i always struggled to finish him. Later on I read someone who described him as "not literature, but incense" and I found it hard to disagree.
When I was a young man I worked in convenience and grocery stores. We would always walk down isles straightening stock and ‘fronting’ it to the isle. Couldn’t help but notice that you changed the order in the slipcases to be alphabetical by author as the video went along. Then your rant at the end! Bet you do this automatically as you walk the aisles of book stores where you’ve been employed.
I spend an inordinate amount of time putting books back in the right order and in the right place- and it gets worse the older I get, hardly anyone bothers to replace items where they find them now is my experience. I'm always ranting inwardly....
Perversely I think most of the Cult Books were more broadly Classics (at least modern) and the "Top Ten" were for the most part cult books. They are both beautiful box sets but I think Penguin might've mixed them up in production and then just went with it.
The Book People were still coming into my work just before the pandemic, not sure if they have since. I think I may have got a Roald Dahl box set off them once.
Yeah, they used to show up on the Uni campus where I ran the bookshop- I had exclusive rights to sell new books there so I was sometimes a little teed off about this, but they were remainder heavy and non-academic, so I let it go.
@@outlawbookselleroriginal they reminded me a lot of The Works, or one of the other remainder style bookshops that used to pop up on the high street every now and then. Very random stock and didn't often find anything.
And I agree with you about Steppenwolf. I read it voraciously, many times, when I was 21. It does not seem to age well as you age, in my experience. I'm sure Penguin had an edition of Joyce's Portrait of The Artist As A Young Man in this livery. Beautiful. My first taste of Joyce. It is , in my opinion, the best place to begin with Joyce: the prose is sharp and spare, the style fairly straight ahead with few flourishes, the story linear and easy to follow. I urge you to get past the Moo Cow clap trap: the book does improve ...
So, I remember a little bit how Penguin thinks in a marketing / organizing kind of way. So the classics box makes relative sense: "Here is a random sampler 10 pack selected from the Penguin Classics line." But that cult collection.... 1) there is no Penguin cult line. 2) a number of those are in Penguin classics, 3) More of the books in the so called "cult" box are standardly used scholastic texts, used in High schools/ Colleges all over the USA. (1984, The Plague, Ellison's Invisible Man); But books like Confederacy of Dunces are known to have a cult following. So, their logic breaks down for me there. Still, they're pretty, and I bet there are collectors slavering for them.
As you say walter, no logic in it. Thrown together. It's a shame that the big publishers with the best backlists routinely make a mess of their legacies.
Whatever is it with yourself, Jon and Kenny: the finds you guys pick up in charity shops! 💚 🤣 I live a 20 minute train journey from Glasgow and the charity shops are _dire!_ Even the genre selection of the Oxfam Book Shop in the West End of the city is terrible... 🙄
It's all serendipity: most of the time the charity shops near me are terrible. Jon keeps visiting one where there are always very good books- and he has the habit of leaving the best ones behind, but he's learning! Kenny has a mature eye, spots the best stuff and I imagine he has the most time on his hands. Finds like the ones in this video are very uncommon, it must be said....
I cannot understand why Penguin haven't bought out John Wyndham's classic SF books reprinting them in those wonderful orange and cream woodcut/linocut covers. They are the A Format editions to have on your bookshelves are they not?
They don't really do anything - or next to nothing- in the orange now. There haven't been orange Wyndhams since the 1980s. Mine are the linocut ones, yeah.
I really like this one. It supports your "real" literature interests as well as "Book Hauler scopaphilia." They are still beautiful printings, and interesting novelties, but if I was pressed for space I don't think I would want most of them. At least, not enough to keep the whole box- and why break them up? As usual, I noticed some across the pond differences: A lot of those so-called "cult" books are actually required school reading over here in the States. Are they still? I don't know if reading is required in schools anymore. . . Just Instagram. I suspect you will decide to sell them. I wish you luck; tell us how much you get 😉.
They are lovely A- formats! BTW, I'm sorry there seem to be some malfunctions with Google's voice dictation and I've tried to go back and edit it and I can't figure out how much was dropped, but it made more sense and did so more eloquently, when I first spoke it. Apologies.
Timely as ever, Steve. Is 1984 more accurate than Brave New World as to what's going on currently, in your view? I have it (DNF/TBR) but I've only read Huxley. I have The Plague (sounds wrong) & A Happy Death & The Outsider (all TBR), aswell as Gatsby (ditto). I read all of Hesse when younger (on recommendation by Timothy Leary, in his best book The Politics of Ecstasy). Finally, did you know W. Burroughs hated Capote, & in fact cursed him? (Another great vid, btw).
'Nineteen Eighty-Four' has proved itself again and again to be the most prescient and relevant SF novel ever for the Modern and Contemporary world. 'Brave New World' is has a further future setting, but elements of it are coming - 'the feelies' are VR and genetic engineering exists. Another book that may yet prove to be the most accurate of all in a predictive sense over the next few decades is Christopher Priests' 'Fugue For A Darkening Island'.
Calling '1984' and 'The Great Gatsby' cult classics seems like a real stretch of the term! I always say "cult classic" to describe something with a small but passionate fanbase, and typically not taught academically/pushed on people by mainstream channels.
Little did I know that the works Camus, Capote, Orwell, Greene, Ellison, Wolfe, et al constituted a set of cult classics. Apparently you can be on every college or advanced high school syllabus and still be a cult classic! I know you make this point in the video, but wow how brazen is this marketing?
A Confederacy of Dunces is one of the funniest novels ever written. Hope you enjoy it!
I've done 13 of those 20.
Good score!
I like your point about the Ted Smart box of books, where you question if they are really cult classics or instead, modern classics. This is the sort of comment that you make all the time which I find enlightening because I never would have thought about it unless it was mentioned. Seems like a small point on my part, but it illustrates one of the myriad intangibles that make the Outlaw Bookseller such an outstanding channel, IMHO. Cheers!
Exactly!
When I was about 13 and started to buy and read serious fiction voraciously, Hesse was important to me. Narziss and Goldmund was my favourite novel for a very long time. I've read only a few Waugh novels, most recently Black Mischief; that and Scoop are very very funny. I love Woolf - I've read most of her novels and I've been thinking of picking up a collection of her essays, of which I've read only a few in anthologies. I've been reading more Greene lately: Our Man in Havana and The Third Man are favourite films, and the accompanying novels are brilliant. I recently re-read The Quiet American and Ministry of Fear, and I have Twenty-One Stories on the boil. Very prolific. As for Orwell, I have a copy of 1984 with a forward by Thomas Pynchon. I've read pretty much all of Orwell's work. I often re-read his essays, which I also have on a Kindle - good for dipping into on the bus. The only LP Hartley I've read are his short ghost stories: I have a nice two volume set of those in a slip case, published by the wonderful Tartarus Press. Great selection, although, like you, I'm not sure why some of those are 'cult classics'.
Yes, they're so obviously not 'Cult Classics' in any way. Greene - love 'The Human Factor', 'Our Man In Havana', 'The Quiet American', 'The Power and the Glory', he's always worth reading. Orwell is peerless in my book.
Fascinating stuff and thought provoking Steve, thanks 👍
Cheers mate. I thought you might like a Penguin video- I was thinking of you when I saw these!
Even just swapping the book sets would make them fit the theme of the boxes much better. Funny that.
Yes- but both slips are identical size, so the books would have been chosen for their sizes as much as content 'We need a really short book now,' etc.
Conrad wanted to write in French but thought he would have a larger audience with English. Brideshead was actually on ITV as was Jewel in the Crown. Not read Waugh but I've heard Vile Bodies & Scoop are two good reads.
I vaguely remember Australian TV did a series based on Greene's The Power & the Glory.
Lastly the real life shipwreck of Whisky Galore was the S.S. Politician. Never go a chance to dive it but I think in the last decade someone got a bottle from it intact.
Pity I can't find a bargain like those 2 sets.
The Go-Between is a wonderful book - well worth reading.
It's one of the first books I read (outside school) where I really saw how skilfully symbolism can be used. Astrological signs feature in the story, and they are subtley portrayed when, say, the male lover is introduced to us holding two pails of water (Aquarius), or the female lover wearing a pure white dress (Virgo). The young lad (the go-between of the title) at one point catches the ball in a cricket match, and causes the male lover to be out of the game, thus foreshadowing that he is going to be the cause of his undoing by the climax of the novel.
So much to analyze, and such gorgeous use of language.
Only ever heard good things about it and it's a major omission for me.
Great little collections! 👍
Yes, lovely stuff!
Nice find. Happy reading. Best wishes.
Yes, I was very lucky there!
Thanks Steve
Thanks Comrade, makes all the diff!!!!
Lovely finds.
While I haven’t gotten to Steppenwolf, I have read Hesse’s Siddhartha. I read it back when I was a Sophomore in high school in my English class and it really helped spark my interest in Buddhism as a religion. Reading Siddhartha before reading Zelazny’s Lord of Light two years ago made that reading experience so much better.
Yes, that happened to me too- I read 'Siddhartha' before the Zelazny.
I had a similar experience with Hesse. Read them all and loved them. They changed my life/calmed me down/made me a better person. I've been meaning to re-read him, but I'm not sure how 63 year old me will react.
Yes, it's interesting how one changes with regard to books- some remain startlers, others diminish, others improve. As Colin WIlson wrote: " A human being is a process, not a thing," which I guess is taking the 'same river twice' idea further.
Nice collection with some beautiful covers. I've read 6/20. I need to get on it.
Penguin made the A format Red series later on. I think it was mostly pre 20th century classics made to look a bit like bestsellers in design
Yeah, remember them.
I read 'The Day of the Triffids' when I was a teenager and it gave me nightmares (in a good sense)! My wife admires 'Demian'. But now I want to read 'Steppenwolf' as well!
I think if you like 'Demain' - for me his finest early novel- 'Steppenwolf' is a must.
I fondly recall having that edition of The Plague and Steppenwulf. I read The Plague in Paris in June 1999. Ah, the tea soaked Madelaine dissolves in my mouth ... sweet reminiscences ...
Camus via Proust there, very French.
I love THE PLAGUE.
Great book.
Haha..."bookish Freudian slip" 🤭
Very nice collections.
I am interested in giving Day of the Triffids a try.
Wyndham's most famous book, obviously, and hugely influential, but not his best: I'd give that accolade to 'The Midwich Cuckoos'.
Very nice -I would have snatched those up too. The boxed themes are rather careless though… 🤔
There is a tendency with the big corporate publishers to throw things together. Just think- both slipcases are identical size, so books would have been chosen based on length too... 'We need a big one now to fill out the box...'.
@@outlawbookselleroriginal yes, good point. I think there would be other themes that could have been used which would fit the contents though because cult classics does not.. 🤭
Hesse was an author I was quite taken with when I was about 20...ignoring the fact that i always struggled to finish him. Later on I read someone who described him as "not literature, but incense" and I found it hard to disagree.
I don't know how I feel about him now, really, so I need to re-read some, as it's been so long. But in my early 20s he really did it for me.
When I was a young man I worked in convenience and grocery stores. We would always walk down isles straightening stock and ‘fronting’ it to the isle. Couldn’t help but notice that you changed the order in the slipcases to be alphabetical by author as the video went along. Then your rant at the end! Bet you do this automatically as you walk the aisles of book stores where you’ve been employed.
I spend an inordinate amount of time putting books back in the right order and in the right place- and it gets worse the older I get, hardly anyone bothers to replace items where they find them now is my experience. I'm always ranting inwardly....
And what do I think when perusing an aisle?
Who are the people who slip a different book between 2 copies of the same book?
Perversely I think most of the Cult Books were more broadly Classics (at least modern) and the "Top Ten" were for the most part cult books. They are both beautiful box sets but I think Penguin might've mixed them up in production and then just went with it.
Exactly, they got it the wrong way round!
The Book People were still coming into my work just before the pandemic, not sure if they have since. I think I may have got a Roald Dahl box set off them once.
Yeah, they used to show up on the Uni campus where I ran the bookshop- I had exclusive rights to sell new books there so I was sometimes a little teed off about this, but they were remainder heavy and non-academic, so I let it go.
@@outlawbookselleroriginal they reminded me a lot of The Works, or one of the other remainder style bookshops that used to pop up on the high street every now and then. Very random stock and didn't often find anything.
@@jackkaraquazian Yep. What you'll notice these days that The Works NEVER has any SF.
A quick Google says they folded in 2019/20 leaving ~£21 million quid owing to various concerns.
@@Fred-gu6pk that's not entirely surprising
And I agree with you about Steppenwolf. I read it voraciously, many times, when I was 21. It does not seem to age well as you age, in my experience.
I'm sure Penguin had an edition of Joyce's Portrait of The Artist As A Young Man in this livery. Beautiful. My first taste of Joyce. It is , in my opinion, the best place to begin with Joyce: the prose is sharp and spare, the style fairly straight ahead with few flourishes, the story linear and easy to follow. I urge you to get past the Moo Cow clap trap: the book does improve ...
I tried, didn't work for me, but you never know. Penguin have done 'Portrait' in many different editions.
So, I remember a little bit how Penguin thinks in a marketing / organizing kind of way. So the classics box makes relative sense: "Here is a random sampler 10 pack selected from the Penguin Classics line."
But that cult collection....
1) there is no Penguin cult line.
2) a number of those are in Penguin classics,
3) More of the books in the so called "cult" box are standardly used scholastic texts, used in High schools/ Colleges all over the USA. (1984, The Plague, Ellison's Invisible Man); But books like Confederacy of Dunces are known to have a cult following.
So, their logic breaks down for me there.
Still, they're pretty, and I bet there are collectors slavering for them.
As you say walter, no logic in it. Thrown together. It's a shame that the big publishers with the best backlists routinely make a mess of their legacies.
Whatever is it with yourself, Jon and Kenny: the finds you guys pick up in charity shops! 💚 🤣 I live a 20 minute train journey from Glasgow and the charity shops are _dire!_ Even the genre selection of the Oxfam Book Shop in the West End of the city is terrible... 🙄
It's all serendipity: most of the time the charity shops near me are terrible. Jon keeps visiting one where there are always very good books- and he has the habit of leaving the best ones behind, but he's learning! Kenny has a mature eye, spots the best stuff and I imagine he has the most time on his hands. Finds like the ones in this video are very uncommon, it must be said....
I cannot understand why Penguin haven't bought out John Wyndham's classic SF books reprinting them in those wonderful orange and cream woodcut/linocut covers.
They are the A Format editions to have on your bookshelves are they not?
They don't really do anything - or next to nothing- in the orange now. There haven't been orange Wyndhams since the 1980s. Mine are the linocut ones, yeah.
Help, Mr. Outlaw .Books 2 and 3 in the Colossus series (Colossus and the Crab etc} anyone got copies of those?@@outlawbookselleroriginal
I really like this one. It supports your "real" literature interests as well as "Book Hauler scopaphilia."
They are still beautiful printings, and interesting novelties, but if I was pressed for space I don't think I would want most of them. At least, not enough to keep the whole box- and why break them up?
As usual,
I noticed some across the pond differences:
A lot of those so-called "cult" books are actually required school reading over here in the States.
Are they still? I don't know if reading is required in schools anymore. . . Just Instagram.
I suspect you will decide to sell them. I wish you luck; tell us how much you get 😉.
If I do sell them, it will be for space reasons: but I do love my A Formats....
They are lovely A- formats!
BTW, I'm sorry there seem to be some malfunctions with Google's voice dictation and I've tried to go back and edit it and I can't figure out how much was dropped, but it made more sense and did so more eloquently, when I first spoke it.
Apologies.
Smudge!!!
Timely as ever, Steve. Is 1984 more accurate than Brave New World as to what's going on currently, in your view? I have it (DNF/TBR) but I've only read Huxley. I have The Plague (sounds wrong) & A Happy Death & The Outsider (all TBR), aswell as Gatsby (ditto). I read all of Hesse when younger (on recommendation by Timothy Leary, in his best book The Politics of Ecstasy). Finally, did you know W. Burroughs hated Capote, & in fact cursed him? (Another great vid, btw).
'Nineteen Eighty-Four' has proved itself again and again to be the most prescient and relevant SF novel ever for the Modern and Contemporary world. 'Brave New World' is has a further future setting, but elements of it are coming - 'the feelies' are VR and genetic engineering exists. Another book that may yet prove to be the most accurate of all in a predictive sense over the next few decades is Christopher Priests' 'Fugue For A Darkening Island'.
Calling '1984' and 'The Great Gatsby' cult classics seems like a real stretch of the term! I always say "cult classic" to describe something with a small but passionate fanbase, and typically not taught academically/pushed on people by mainstream channels.
I would agree with your POV on this. It's a little like calling items of cultural production that have been around for two minutes 'iconic'.
Little did I know that the works Camus, Capote, Orwell, Greene, Ellison, Wolfe, et al constituted a set of cult classics. Apparently you can be on every college or advanced high school syllabus and still be a cult classic! I know you make this point in the video, but wow how brazen is this marketing?
Yes, it doesn't wash really, does it?
@@outlawbookselleroriginal honestly you could have literally just exchanged the boxes and the books would have been categorized more believably!
A Confederacy Of Dunces was a nice read imo. Tinge of sadness underlining the humour.
Yes, I loved that book.