Penguin Modern Classics Obsession Part Four:

What follows is my non-exhaustive Penguin Modern Classics wish list — a selection of other exceptional cover designs whose books I would like to buy and frame, if money and wall space were no object. I have grouped them into ten themed series, ordered just as I would display them on the wall.

 
Series One: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Collected Short Stories; Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square; George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air; and the two Jean Rhys books Good Morning, Midnight and Quartet.

Series Two: Primo Levi’s Moments of Reprieve; Eugène Ionesco’s single-volume Rhinoceros, The Chairs, and The Lesson; Vladimir Nabokov’s Annotated Lolita; William Trevor’s The Children of Dynmouth; Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories; Nabokov’s King, Queen, Knave; and John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos.

Series Three: John Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent; Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, André Gide’s The Immoralist, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and Ernest Shackleton’s South.

Series Four: Sigmund Freud’s ‘The Wolfman’ and Other Cases, Albert Camus’s The First Man, Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Age of Reason, Ronald Firbank’s Three Novels, Saul Bellow’s Herzog (already on the wall), Camus’s The Fall, and E.M. Forster’s Collected Short Stories.

Series Five: The two Steinbeck books The Log from The Sea of Cortez and The Short Reign of Pippin IV, and H.G. Wells’s A Short History of the World.

Series Six: The two Georges Bataille books Story of the Eye and Blue of Noon, Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor, and Anaïs Nin’s Henry and June.

Series Seven: Levi’s If Not Now, When?; Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading;
Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo; Steinbeck’s Cup of Gold; and John Buchan’s Greenmantle.

Series Eight: Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf, Nathanael West’s single-volume Miss Lonelyhearts and A Cool Million, Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, and L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between.

Series Nine: Italo Calvino’s Italian Folktales, Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Wyndham’s The Chrysalids, and Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels.

Series Ten: Conrad’s The Secret Agent, Steinbeck’s To a God Unknown, and Martin Amis’s Money. (As I have said before: I am a sucker for clouds.)