The Penguin Classics series has done a lot to revive the coolness stakes of classic literature. The affordable, orange and white collectables are as ubiquitous in bookshops as they are on once-empty bookshelves in people’s homes. To be honest, I like the fact that the advertising juggernaut is churning out as many retro mugs, bags, postcards and other orange and white monogrammed tie-ins as they can deliver to an eager public. I like standing on the tram next to someone with a ‘Great Gatsby’ tote bag or seeing someone reading ‘Dark Star Safari’ on a bench; it gives me renewed faith. People do read. Penguin’s retro marketing was a success; there has been a renaissance in the collectable book and book related products. I just hope that the people who buy them do actually read them 
I am loving the way Penguin seems to be involving young people in their marketing campaign for the ’75 new titles.’ It’s great! I’m so happy that such a diverse range of authors from Anais Nin to William Burroughs are able to stand alongside the more traditional classics in the Penguin canon. I am in full support of a broadening of the horizons of what constitutes a ‘Classic.’
However, I think that Penguin went a little too far last year with the release of Twitterature by Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin. Earlier this week, I absentmindedly picked this book up at the counter while paying at the University Bookshop on the strength of the orange and white cover. I realised all too soon that I had been duped. This was not a new Classic at all. Oh, how witty those folks at Penguin were being, using the cover for irony. For Twitterature is of course ‘the world’s greatest books told in twenty Tweets or less.’ The Classics butchered up into netspeak canapes to be washed down with gallons of Pepsi and a KFC bargain bucket. It is for high school students who need a plot synopsis before class when they haven’t read the book. It is a stocking filler from your Uncle who is always cracking unfunny jokes at Christmas dinner. (It is a joke of course, I know I should lighten up). But it is also…. well, it is…. selling quite well…. (as are other spinoffs in the Twitterature genre).
Trust me when I tell you that i’m not the person mentioned in this video who said they wanted to punch the smug authors of Twitterature in the face, but I am not alone in my disparaging tone, or in thinking that this sets the precedent for the lazy way out of reading. Or is it the future? Perhaps I am overreacting to a harmelss joke.
Of course Twitterature has been marketed in a very positive, pro-reading tone, (at least Twitterature gets the youth of today away from the computer screen for 10minutes to understand something of classical literature) but it breaks my heart that on Penguin’s website, they put up for question the ultimate bullet in their own foot; ‘as great as the Classics are, who has time to read those big, long books anymore?’ As far as I can see, this undoes all of the good work brought on by the Penguin classics. And besides, I still read those big books, don’t you?
Kateinoz33's Blog 