The Penguin Clothbound Classic, in Context

Old Books, New Paint: How Penguin commodifies literary pedigree with its Clothbound Classics. My undergraduate dissertation.

Introduction

In making what amounted to the first serious attempt to introduce ‘branded goods’ to the book trade, Allen Lane had the wit to realize the cumulative publicity value of, first, a consistent and easily recognizable cover design, and, secondly, a good trademark that would be easy to treat pictorially, easy to say and easy to remember,

wrote Ben Travers, colleague of Penguin founder Allen Lane on the creation of Penguin Books (Hare, 1995). Penguin Books, now Penguin Random House, were the company that transformed paperback books from cheap novelties to the dominant method of consumption for serious literature (Neubeiser, 2015). Their founding myth has become industry legend. As told by Penguin themselves:

In 1934, on his way to London after visiting his friend Agatha Christie, the young publisher Allen Lane stopped at the station bookstall at Exeter St Davids and saw that all the books on sale were of a poor quality and overpriced. What was needed, he realised, were good books at a price everyone could afford. Within a year he had founded Penguin Books, creating a paperback revolution that democratised quality literature and would fundamentally change the publishing world forever. (Penguin, 2025)

In 1946, the Penguin Classics line (Bristol) began with E. V. Rieu’s translation of the Odyssey, Penguin claiming cultural cachet over the old canon and the new form (Neubeiser, 2025). On the surface, this cultural pedigree seems incongruous with the Penguin Clothbound Classics, a line of hardback reprints of reprints emphasising their colourful designs and cultural pedigree. Immensely profitable, they have become a new fixation in reading communities for the hardback book as an aesthetic choice and a material object.

This dissertation first examines the clothbound classic as a cultural and semiotic object, and then examines the ways in which Penguin through their paratext reshape the original text to carry new meaning in the new edition, with specific reference to the gothic classics Frankenstein and Dorian Grey, charting how they compare to books that came out later, translated works or in different formats. I then examine the line as a whole as an example of its own canon, in reference to the idea of the Western ‘Classics’ as well as comparative hardback lines, such as the Harvard Classics library and the Everyman’s Library series, which the Clothbounds are in direct incestuous competition with.

There is much discourse in attempting to define what constitutes a classic, discussed further in my literature review. It is not the purpose of this dissertation to contribute to said discourse. Whilst it is essential in the course of this research to understand varying definitions of a classic and how these books may be selected by Penguin to represent the name, when Calvino defines classics by the reader’s experience with them (Calvino, 2009), the reading experience of a Penguin consumer has no power over the fact that these books are the ones in cloth and others are not. As Neubeiser writes, “How people perceive types of work is directly correlated to how publishers promote them. It is then logical to conclude that if a publisher chooses to promote a series as classical, readers will undoubtedly accept that any work included in the series is a classic” (Neubeiser, pp. 19-20). This dissertation takes for granted that the classics have been defined repeatedly, there are more of them than can be contained in the clothbound classics, the complete list of books ever considered classics– putting aside the biases and agendas of whoever collates such list– is a Venn diagram of circles stretching ad infinitum, and ergo there is some degree of exclusion between the clothbounds and the classics as a whole.

Chapter 1 of this dissertation deals with a reader’s relationship to any available clothbound irrespective of the specific level of modification, through the lenses of Henry Jenkins, William Merrin, John Thompson and Gerard Genette, highlighting the aestheticization that has driven the clothbounds’ market prominence. Chapter 2 zooms into a micro level to interrogate several case studies in sequence, using them to highlight the paratextual modifications to a reader’s perspective through those case studies, in the lens of Foucault and Barthes, exploring the way the clothbounds induct the reader into a historical heritage through their consumption of classic literature. Chapter 3 goes macro, analysing the sociological effects of these books given this level of publisher’s attention and placement in a series, and compares the clothbounds to other hardback lines like the Harvard Classics, Everyman’s Library and the Wordsworth editions through the lenses of Pierre Bourdieu, Umberto Eco, Charles Eliot and Kelly Neubeiser, and exploring the way the presentation bends the historicity induced through the reading experience. In my conclusion I synthesise all of these lenses through the added context of Jameson’s writing on postmodern capitalism and contrasting implementations of Plato’s cave.

Literature Review

Penguin

The body of literature on Penguin is immense. A key text for this research is Penguin Portrait: Allen Lane and the Penguin Editors (1995), edited by Steve Hare, the authority on Penguin. Penguin Portrait is a compilation of letters, notices and other writings , interspersed with context written by Hare, and thus provides a useful primary and secondary source on the inner workings of the company. Whilst focused on the period Penguin was under the management of the Lane family – and so lacking information on Penguin’s modern exploits – Penguin Portrait is also useful as a starting point to look at form. The letters included in the book give an insight into the decisions involved in the ‘paperback revolution,’ and so can be used to see which of the same decisions were used when reprinting the backlist in hardback.

Kelly Neubeiser’s Masters’ dissertation, Reinventing the Classics: Penguin and the Evolution of a Timeless Genre (2015) deals with the history of Penguin and their role in defining ‘classics.’ Neubeiser aims to “evaluate critically the necessary criteria for a work of literature to be considered a classic” (p. 7) by examining the Penguin Classics. Neubeiser’s key argument is that it is the power of the publisher and marketing rather than any other textual or critical factors that bestow ‘classic’ status on any one title.

if it is assumed that classics literature has a place in a place in a society's cultural landscape, publishers hold an element of power over what works are included within that landscape... For example, a reader may see an ad for a book distinctly promoting it asa classic and then come to forever regard it as such.” (Neubeiser, pp. 20-21)

Materiality

On the subject of book collecting, Jack Walsdorf in The Literature of the Book (2005) provides an ample reading list, of which I have read several. Richard Altick’s The English Common Reader (1963), like John Brewer’s The Pleasures of the Imagination (2013), is an invaluable historical resource examining how reading and reading culture have been shaped by their society throughout the past three centuries. Both books also describe how the backlist was also a key issue in the formation of copyright (Altick, pp. 58) (Brewer, pp. 126), which continues to underpin the publishing industry. Walsdorf also includes Sven Birkerts’ The Gutenberg Elegies (1994), a text about the superseding of the book as an object by newer technologies. Whilst Berkerts wrote his book in 1994 and thus with the benefit of hindsight we can see his fears have not come to pass, Birkerts’ fixation on the object of the book and the question of how much a book is text and how much it is paper is a useful lens through which to analyse the clothbounds.

Roland Barthes’ S/Z (1970) is one of the key foundational texts on the materiality of the book, but like the above focuses most of its page count on the way a reader processes the text. Drawing on his earlier work in Death of the Author (1967), whose reputation precedes itself, S/Z is a line-by-line reading of Balzac’s Sarrasine examining how the reader takes in information from the text on a word-by-word basis, indicating which words convey semiotic, lexical and connotational meaning.

Unfortunately, much of the available literature on book publishing deals with backlist reprinting merely as a neat side effect of a publisher holding the rights to a title. The publishing market works on publishers selling books for as long as they own them, so it is therefore natural that publishers reprint; therefore, much of the available literature seems to address this topic similarly to researching how to breathe. What I have managed to find instead is a large body of adjacent literature dealing with the common themes I have identified in the topic – curation, collection, form, copyright and the concept of a literary classic. In particular, Merchants of Culture (2013) and Book Wars (2021) by John B. Thompson provide a good background on trade publishing in general, of which Penguin plays a large part. The use of Book Wars is more situational than Merchants of Culture; whilst a very good and readable resource as a full text, the particular sections of interest to me include chapter 2 on reinventing the book and other sections on transmission via the internet, which among other things deal with the development of Project Gutenberg and its intersection with the public domain (p. 22).

The Canon

Italo Calvino, in Why Read the Classics? (1986) writes “A classic is a work which relegates the noise of the present to a background hum, which at the same time the classics cannot exist without” (p. 20). Here Calvino indicates two ways of looking at a canon – as a series of texts produced at indeterminate times in the general malaise of the past, and as a collection of texts arranged at a specific time in a specific context. Calvino also indicates in Jenkinsian manner that “‘your’ classic is a book to which you cannot remain indifferent, and which helps you define yourself in relation or even in opposition to it.” Kelly Neubeiser’s dissertation is far more explicit with its first line: “Everyone knows what a classic is” (p. 1). The themes raised are those of both universality and individuality – a single universal text or body of work that imparts an individualised meaning, which echoes the work of Roland Barthes.

For a more historical perspective, The Pleasures of the Imagination (2013) by John Brewer (specifically its first and last thirds) is useful as an overview of publishing practice and authorship throughout the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. Brewer’s book is more broadly about arts and culture in general, but it is interesting to look at the Clothbound Classics through the lenses of performance and museum curation that Brewer describes. Brewer also crucially describes the development of publishing practice, much of which has persisted into the present day, especially the early development of copyright law and the public domain. Finally, the Clothbound Classics are a largely British pantheon, dealt with in this text through the development of British print culture.

On a holistic level, Christopher Beha’s The Whole Five Feet: What The Great Books Taught Me (2009) is a personal memoir dealing with Beha’s year-long attempt to read the entire Harvard Classics bookshelf. Whilst written for a casual and not academic audience, Beha’s memoir deals with the personal relationships he developed with each book and the canon as a whole. It is not an academic text, but it provides an important case study in the emotional development of a man attempting to read an entire curated corpus. “The book I intended to write was essentially a comedy, about a feckless, somewhat lost young man who shuts himself away from the modern world and its cultural white noise,” Beha writes. “That story didn’t turn out the way I expected it to. There were no simple lessons or pat answers. Nor was there any comical shutting out of the world—the one common feature of all these books was precisely the fact that they kept sending me back into the world.” (ibid, p. 177) Whilst intrinsically related to Beha’s own life, such sentiments illustrate the impossibility of removing the classics from the context of their readership, both in relation to their historical context and own compartmentalization as historical artefacts.

Of course, Pierre Bourdieu’s work still defines how in Europe education, class, and the interests of a liberal elite determine the ‘taste’ of the canon. Bourdieu’s Distinction (1979) analyses the influences of class and capital on education, alleging that it is primarily a liberal European education that determines how people respond to art and culture, allowing their tastes to better categorize their social distinction in society. “Academic capital is in fact the guaranteed product of the combined effects of cultural transmission by the family and cultural transmission by the school,” Bourdieu writes. (p. 50) “The generalizing tendency is inscribed in the very principle of the disposition to recognize legitimate works… which is inseparable from the capacity to recognise in them something already known… or as members of a class of works.” (ibid, p. 54) Bourdieu describes the education system as teaching people how to respond to ‘legitimate works’ and thus consecrating a set of ingrained societal ideals “from the unintentional learning made possible by a disposition acquire through domestic or scholastic inoculation of legitimate culture.” (p. 55) The most valuable part of Distinction, however, lies in the footnotes and interviews in which Bourdieu supplements his primary research, separating Bourdieu from the more abstractly theoretical works of other post ‘68 French thinkers and the broader postmodern movement, for example, hyperrealists Baudrillard and Zizek, who respond to but do not directly catalogue large but granular socio-cultural tendencies. Neubeiser (2015, p. 21) highlights Bourdieu’s discussion of symbolic capital (1979, p. 147) as critical to the classics’ success-

if a work is academically adopted, it can be regarded as a classic. Publishers, then, are “simple merchants”... (147) The only way they can participate in building the pantheon of classics – “the capital of consecration” – is if they become an astronomically powerful player in the industry (148). (Neubeiser, 2015, p. 21, quoting Bourdieu, 1979)

Postmodernism & Paratext

Much of the subject matter inherent to the clothbound classics are the same themes inherent to postmodernist thought; a flattening of time outside the present, an overabundance of narrative conveyed by individual purchasing choices, the death of a product for product’s sake, hyperreality and paratext. My key sources for approaching postmodernism are Fredrick Jameson’s seminal work Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (2008) and the various works of the deconstructionists, postmodernists and semioticians that Jameson builds on – Bourdieu, Baudrillard, Eco, Zizek, Foucault et al.

To make a bold statement, postmodern theory is by virtue of its newness is a mile wide and an inch deep. Each of these titles takes the same core set of ideas expressed by Jameson in Postmodernism, stemming from Foucault et al, and applies it to a new area. The resulting scholarship sheds light on the affected area but does not develop the original ideas– a systematic reduction of the view of history and a critical look at institutions and economic practices. To make a hyperbolic statement, nobody cares about the above themes involved in postmodernism except me. For example, Barthes’ work on paratext, including the critical-to-this-dissertation Death of the Author, was presented as an opposition to contemporary and dominant literary scholarship. Barthes’ lines of inquiry and scholarship, genius that he is, brilliant as they are, are ultimately to a purpose. The same with Foucault, whose work ultimately revolved around critiquing and analysing institutions. Since Genette invented paratext, the seminal scholarship on paratext has remained by Genette. The work was developed insofar as their greater purposes required, they finished, and then they all died.

Methodology

For aid in picking case studies and examples, and examining the clothbound corpus as a whole, I created a spreadsheet to analyse which of the clothbounds have the most paratext additions- introductions, endnotes, maps, facsimile title cards, translations, and so on. Edits to the text were tallied, as were additional paraphernalia, and the two were multiplied to give a final value, from where I could pick specific clothbounds of either high or low modification and analyse them in more detail. The ‘unique’ tag, originally made just to refer to Julia Lovell’s Monkey King, refers to any clothbound with material made specifically for that clothbound.

In the 2020s, “One third (32%) of Gen Z and millennials download or read books for free from unlicensed sources” (Berens, Noorda, 2003, p. 14). The classics, being largely out of copyright, have had a more overt relationship with free digital download through platforms such as Project Gutenberg and StandardEbooks. The intention of the spreadsheet is to measure how difficult it would be, were one to start with a laptop, unlimited access to the entire internet, Adobe Suite, and infinite time, to reconstitute the text of the clothbound front-to-back without access to the clothbound itself. For example, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, being a reprint with zero additions, could theoretically be recreated by ripping the full text from a piracy site in much less time than it would take someone to find specifically E. V. Rieu’s translation of the Iliad, the additional introductions, maps and so forth, and put the entire thing together.

The spreadsheet documents all the clothbounds made available for purchase on the Penguin website during the working period (June 2024-April 2025). It does not document those unavailable for purchase from Penguin or retailers, except those (in particular, Remembrance of Things Past) that became available for purchase and then subsequently disappeared again. The spreadsheet then necessarily excludes titles like the Penguin India editions, the Mahabharata, Ramayana, Bhagavad Gita and Quran, which I found only references to through online listings and resales, which will in itself be unpacked in Chapter 2.

A second tab was made on the spreadsheet for the content of each text. As one undergraduate with imperfect information and a limited budget, I first catalogued each of the classics that I had read. For those I had not (to highlight one example, A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole) I consulted friends, colleagues and acquaintances who had read the work in question, and where a reader could not be found I relied on surrounding research. (In this respect, I would like to extend thanks to Dana Ziebarth, Cel Crue, Anne Brenneman, Amy Blay and Dr. Jane Potter for their contributions.)

Whilst dealing with the commercial aspects of the clothbounds existing within the current economic landscape, this dissertation is first and foremost focused on the consumer relationship with the clothbounds and not with the rationale behind Penguin’s choices when handling the line. Taking a Barthes approach to paratext, the intention is to examine the clothbounds as they exist, rather than how anyone intended them to exist.

Chapter 1: The Penguin Clothbound Classic

Much of this book therefore is a panegyric preached over an empty coffin.

– Evelyn Waugh, preface to Brideshead Revisited (1959)

First, a physical description.

The Penguin Clothbound Classic is a six-by-nine-inch book with a glued sectioned binding. For a physical description, BeautifulBooks.com (the most expansive catalogue of the Clothbounds on the internet, even compared to official Penguin websites) writes that

They use Forest Stewardship Council-approved paper, but earlier volumes were not acid-free so may brown over time) with a glued binding. I would estimate with the most careful of handling, the glue will probably last for about 40 years at the most. It is also worth noting that the covers can be hard to clean because the surface is textured cloth, and the cover design can come off if you are not careful.

As of 2024 there are one hundred and five books in the series, all reprints, with four new books released each year. Among other hardback lines, the clothbounds have surged to bookstore dominance, often shelved adjacent to but apart from the competition. The beauty is integral to the brand- their online listings loudly boast designs by the ‘award winning Coralie Bickford-Smith.’ Each book has a solid and simple bicolour palette with a tessellated design representing a symbol from the book, some more literal than others (Don Quixote has a knight, representing the Don himself, whereas The Brothers Karamazov’s maze-like lines seem to represent the twisting mind games the brothers inflict upon each other).

The Penguin Classics and the Penguin brand in general have, under the directorship of Allen Lane, have had a complicated relationship with advertising practices. As Neubeiser writes,

It was Lane’s view that great literature and commercial packaging had no place together. His antiquated opinion would not survive the changes of modern-­‐day society, but his original ideal of maintaining quality would prove transcendent, particularly with the development of the Penguin Classics under the helm of Betty Radice. (Neubeiser, p. 25)

At first glance, the Clothbound Classics might look like the Penguin Classics line in a fancy dress, but this is not always the case. The Penguin Classics Les Miserables, for example, uses the Christine Donohue translation, whereas the clothbound loans a translation from The Folio Society by Norman Denny. The clothbounds also often boast significant extra paratext that can sometimes be found in the Penguin Black Classics paperbacks, but not in other classic lines that Penguin produce, and often mixed or remixed with original supplementary data. In addition to an introduction, they often contain appendices, endnotes, and facsimile reproductions of illustrations and covers from the first editions. Confusingly, it is also frequent that they do not contain additional paratext- the clothbound 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea contains the exact same translation and paratext as its paperback counterpart, compiled by its translator David Coward. (Verne, Coward, 2017) In all cases, the book is modified on some level, even if just a symbol referencing the cover is implanted on the front page. The clothbounds do in 2025 make up a significant part of Penguin Classics as an imprints’ bottom line- since the line’s inception with its first batch of titles in 2008 the clothbound Pride and Prejudice has become Penguin Classics’ thirteenth bestselling title with a total consumer market value of £1,430,913.83, a number beaten mainly by books with tenure on school reading lists. For a large portion of their publication history the market presence of the clothbound was unobtrusive, but post-pandemic the line experienced a huge market boom.

Holistically, this boom coincides with the emergence of the Dark Academia aesthetic. Sourced from Dark Academia’s ‘bible’ The Secret History by Donna Tartt, the aesthetic focuses on the romanticisation of higher education, of study and late nights involved in discussing intellectual pursuits with a close-knit group-bordering-on-polycule of similarly erudite peers. Much like the classics themselves, Dark Academia has often been criticized for the glamorization of the liberal education system and a predominantly white European focus (Simone Murray writes that it is ‘as profoundly white and Anglo as an old-time Ralph Lauren catalogue’ (Murray, 2023)), but it would perhaps be unfair to acknowledge this as a groundbreaking critique of the aesthetic, as they themselves stem from groundbreaking critique of Dark Academia The Secret History. YouTube Commentator Rowan Ellis describes the practice of dark academia is to transform the participant’s apartment into that of two of the novel’s focal characters, Charles and Camilla Macaulay.

…Books were stacked on every available surface; the tables were cluttered with papers, ashtrays, bottles of whiskey, boxes of chocolates; umbrellas and galoshes made passage difficult in the narrow hall… Camilla’s night table was littered with empty teacups, leaky pens, dead marigolds in a water glass, and on the foot of her bed was laid a half-played game of solitaire. (Tartt, 1992, p.?)

Despite being at the time of writing a five year old aesthetic, dark academia has become a highly marketable genre, with books such as Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House (2019), Rebecca Kuang’s Babel (2022) and Katabasis (2025) and M. L. Rio’s If We Were Villains spawning high sales numbers and continued attention (Comerford, 2022) (Brown, 2024).

The synthesis of beauty and education is the simultaneous thesis of dark academia and the clothbound classic, and thus like all aesthetics the clothbound classic has taken up residence in the two modern homes of the aesthetic, Instagram and TikTok. “The hashtag #booktok on TikTok, which counts almost one hundred billion views as of April 2023, is used to share book recommendations, discuss favourite characters and plots, and celebrate the joy of reading, through the creation of user generated content,” writes Elizavet Rozaki in Reading Between The Likes: The Influence of BookTok on Reading Culture (2023, p. 5). Rozaki summarises the most common criticism of BookTok thusly:

BookTok has received criticism for promoting a competitive mindset among users focused on reading as many books as possible, leading to a lack of critical engagement and a devaluation of literary works, while also perpetuating a lack of diversity in the books being promoted and an emphasis on aesthetics over the actual reading experience. As Pierce humorously notes, “with all of this effort being put into being seen as a reader, one wonders how any of them have the time to read.” (ibid, p. 8)

Barry Pierce’s highly critical piece for GQ magazine, quoted here, refers to BookTok as “a parallel universe where reading wasn’t just something that someone did for fun, it was a lifestyle, an aesthetic” (Pierce, 2023), implying that Pierce himself has arrived from another universe into this one where reading has been like that for most of literary history. Brewer notes that “by the early nineteenth century the library had become the centre of indoor sociability for the house guest” (Brewer, p. 154). “The book had ceased to be merely a text and had become an icon and object which conveyed a sense of its owner” (ibid, p. 158). Brewer also writes that “the wisdom about circulating libraries was that they were repositories of fictional pap, served up to women of leisure who had little to do but surfeit themselves with romantic nonsense.” (ibid, p. 149) Meanwhile, near the end of Pierce’s article, Pierce writes

When I was in a bookshop recently I noticed it had a whole bay dedicated to these BookTok books. Trying to explain what this meant to the person I was with, I told them that it was basically a subgenre of easily-bingeable novels that all sort of have the same cover. They paused for a second and told me that I had basically just described what Mills & Boon books are. Part of me, for the first time in my life, felt like defending Mills & Boon. (Pierce, 2023)

Sarah Rose Wiseman links criticism of BookTok’s romance tastes to patriarchal societal attitudes.

“The genre is dismissed completely in the social zeitgeist and has been for centuries, despite Romance being a bestselling genre. We can contribute the dismissal and some surface level criticism of the genre to the system of patriarchy.” Pierce, however, links his distaste towards BookTok with his distaste towards commercialism. “Near the end of the 2010s, many of the major BookTubers had essentially become pawns in the hands of publishing houses. They’d receive boxes upon boxes of books that they’d then “haul” (basically, just show off) and then you’d never see those books mentioned again.” Rozaki cites Boffone and Jerasa (2021), who discuss BookTok as being largely young and queer, seeking an online community. It would not be fair to discuss BookTok as if its criticisms were entirely rooted in misogyny or homophobia. Nor would it follow to act like such sentiments have not been widespread through historical discussions of readers and readership as long as such topics have been discussed. In addition, Niemetz in Left Turn Ahead: Surveying Attitudes of Young People towards Capitalism and Socialism links younger, woker Gen Z to more broadly left-wing opinions and social values, in particular anti-capitalism, (“when presented with an anti-capitalist statement, a large majority of young people – usually around three quarters – agree with it, and many of them – usually around a quarter or a third – strongly so.” (Niemetz, p. 67)) To strawman both BookTok and its critics, the transitive property can then be applied: BookTok is largely young, female and queer. Youths, women and queer people are largely anti-capitalist. BookTok largely endorses mass consumption, some would say fetishization, of finite resources produced by a limited number of companies. BookTok therefore can be said to hold contradictory opinions. Niemenz goes on to write that “the fact remains that large numbers of people – often around a quarter of respondents – simultaneously agree with an anti- capitalist and a pro-capitalist statement on the same issue.” (ibid.) He concludes

“It makes much more sense to think of politically active young socialists as akin to Instagram influencers. Influencers are always ‘unrepresentative’ in the sense that most of us are not nearly as up to speed on fashion (or whatever their area of influence) and not remotely as interested in it as they are. Influencers are also ‘unrepresentative’ in the sense that they dedicate a large proportion of their lives to something that most of us only have a superficial interest in. But that does not mean that they are ‘just a bubble’ whose activities have no impact on ‘real people’. It does not mean that they are not influential – they by definition are.”

All of this to say is that it’s complicated.

Rozaki goes on to write that into the present, citing Pressman, author of Bookishness: Loving Books In A Digital Age (2020) that

people often view their books as a representation of themselves, which is why they may place a high value on the visual aesthetics of their library. It is therefore no surprise that readers on TikTok share videos of their organised bookshelves including decorative elements and a variety of colourful books. (Rozaki, p. 6)

In The Way We Read Fiction Now: Penguin and Neo-Victorian Book Design (2014) Chris Louttit quotes Coralie Bickford-Smith as saying, ‘The tradition of my craft really comes from looking at Victorian book binding,’ and goes on to categorise the Victorian clothbounds as neo-Victorian products (ibid, p. 9):

[Bickford-Smith’s] work, in other words, marks a return to Victorian-influenced practices, but not without self-consciousness. To return to Heilmann and Llewellyn’s already cited definition of neo-Victorianism, it is as much an ‘act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery and (re)vision concerning the Victorians’ as a safe retread of Victorian methods of book design. (ibid, p. 10)

Regardless, the style of the clothbound has proved desirable to replicate by consumers for books not originally counted in the clothbound library. On independent commerce sites such as Etsy, rebindings of popular BookTok books such as the A Court of Thorns and Roses series by Sarah J. Maas are sold as collector’s items for three-digit prices. The semiotic value that the clothbounds hold in their status as classics is transferred onto the two-colour patterned cloth design, which can then transfer the prestige onto other works.

Chapter 2: The Penguin Clothbound Case Studies

And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper.

– Mary Shelley, introduction to Frankenstein (1831)

Some time before Allen Lane got stuck at a train station, a similar historic vacation took place. The Mount Tambora explosion killed 90,000 people (Schurer, 2019) (Evans, 2002), but its most famous victim was one young German undergraduate. Victor Frankenstein was conceived by Mary Shelley during a scary story competition between her, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and Byron’s doctor, Polidori (who at the same occasion produced The Vampyre, the proto-Dracula). The Penguin Clothbound Frankenstein wants you to be aware of this. Whilst it is rare for a first time reader to read an introduction before the book (and many clothbounds’ introductions are prefaced with a warning that ‘this introduction makes the detail of the plot explicit’) a pure front-to-back Barthesian reading of Frankenstein sets this gothic vacation, with a soot-blackened sky and four tortured poets trapped in the ur-Covid Lockdown as the setting for the reader. Fittingly enough, the conception of Frankenstein was gothic to the extreme – the introduction sets the mood and literary context whilst priming the reader for the story (or, as later evident, stories) of the volume.

It is therefore possible to read the clothbound Frankenstein as an edition of Frankenstein about Frankenstein, in which Frankenstein happens to simply be the key text in a course of your education about Mary Shelley’s polycule.

The paratext surrounding the text do not just educate the reader about the text, they induct the reader into the Shelley’s book club. The reader does not just get Mary Shelley’s work, but they get every text produced on the horrible no-good very bad vacation. It is the Dark Academia fantasy par excellence, in which the protagonist (reader) may be inducted into a secret society of romantic intellectuals (Ellis, 2021). Whilst Shelley and Polidori completed their stories, Byron did not, and yet his poem is printed alongside the two complete works.

It would be easy to presume that, like most purchasers of special editions like those sold by the Folio Society, purchasers of the clothbounds are already familiar with the work and revisiting old favourites. This cannot be counted on to be the case; these books are advertised as desirable for their physical beauty irrespective of their contents, and in many cases are delivered as part of gift crates and loot bundles. These paratexts assume the reader is unfamiliar with the wider context of the work.

It is possible to read the clothbound Picture of Dorian Grey as an edition of Dorian Grey about the trial of Oscar Wilde, in which Dorian Grey happens to simply be the key text in the course of your education about the author and his boyfriend, the worst man in history. The endnotes, collected by Robert Mighall, highlight specific quotations which were used against Wilde in his historic sodomy trial. In chapter 10 of Dorian Grey Dorian thinks of “love as Michael Angelo had known, and Montaigne, and Winckellman, and even Shakespeare himself” (Wilde, Mighall p. 115). Mighall adds: “Wilde made a similar connection between these figures and their supposed adoption of an idealised form of homosexual love in his second trial at the Old Bailey in 1895,” going on to quote the speech at length (Ibid, p. 243). The appendices of Dorian Grey consist of a collection of contemporary reviews of its original 1900 publication, presented in contrast with the original Penguin Classics introduction. The reader is positioned to view the book as an artefact from a larger conflict.

In Roland Barthes’ S/Z, Barthes divides the text of Honore de Balzac’s Sarrassine into three distinct signifiers of meaning that convey the story to the audience: semes, cultural codes and antithesis. Lacking the wordcount for the whole introduction, we can still apply the same tactics to the opening paragraph of, let’s say, David Copperfield.

Critics- seme, culture and erudition- used to - still do- argue over- seme, conflict developing a sense of narrative, which Dickens they prefer: cultural code, critics’ opinions are known to be less opinion-based than those of non-critics, his early work, from the first newspaper pieces he wrote which were reprinted as Sketches by Boz in 1836- cultural code, the Victorian era, and his first novels, the Pickwick Papers, through to Dombey and Son; or the later novels. Antithesis- past versus future, youth versus age. Seme, youthful vitality and performance against refined, incisive technique.

By the end of the first sentence we have the ingredients of story: place, character, conflict and most alluringly the sense of participation – the reader is holding the macguffin in their hands.

Only one of the clothbound classics appears intended to be read whilst doing something else. John Deathridge’s translation of Wagner's Ring Cycle, or The Ring of the Nibelung on the cover, is an edition of the libretto of the larger operas. The Ring of the Nibelung’s new translation was the subject of a new morsel of paratext, a paper ribbon binding the book screaming the translation’s newness all over the Waterstones Beautiful Books table. In truth, the 2018 translation was not that new upon release (see appendix) and certainly is not new now, no matter what the ribbon continues to proclaim. There is a reason that Deathridge’s name on the ribbon is larger than Wagner’s name on the cover. Deathridge, emeritus professor of music at King’s College London, is not allowed by his title to be incorrect about Wagner; regardless, the rendering of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk into text seems on the surface odd- how does one remove elements from a product designed to be a ‘total work of art?’ Deathridge’s introduction is a defense. He lauds the strength of the libretto, its identity as a piece of art unto itself, and mentions how his translation divorces the text from the music and the performance whilst still telling the full story. It is not unlike a Star Wars novelization. The same beat by beat plot rendered into a form that permits the absence of motion; fundamentally a different work of art. Despite this, the advertising copy reads that

The libretto for The Ring lies at the heart of nineteenth century culture. It is in itself a work of power and grandeur, and it had an incalculable effect on European and specifically German culture. John Deathridge's superb new translation, with notes and a fascinating introduction, is essential for anyone who wishes to fully engage with one of the great musical experiences. (Penguin Shop, n.d. )

It is an instrument of education, an invitation into culture, and most importantly advertised as a companion to itself; a book with a commentary track and DVD extras. The copy also emphasises the work’s relative importance, ‘at the heart of nineteenth century culture,’

As referenced in the methodology, Penguin are oddly secretive over which clothbounds exist, rarely allowing books that are out of print to maintain a web presence in official sources. In 2024, their three-volume set of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, or in this case Scott Moncrieff’s translation as Remembrance of Things Past (as opposed to its more modern title, In Search of Lost Time) was placed back on the Penguin website as an upcoming to-be-released book, as opposed to what it actually was, a re-release after the original run went out of print.

The Penguin India Special Editions are the most elusive clothbounds by far. Four clothbound editions of religious epics, the Mahabharata (tr. John D. Smith) Bhagavad Gita (tr. Juan Mascaro, part of the Mahabharata highly truncated in Smith’s translation) Ramayana (tr. Arshia Sattar Valmiki) and Qur’an (tr. Tarif Khalidi). Each are available in Penguin Classics paperback, but beautifulbooks.info (2025) is the only source that records these editions as part of the clothbound set, a page that looks like theirs having been erased on the Penguin India website (Penguin India, 2025), and their existence is confirmed only by rare library listings and ebay sellers listing them for three figure prices. (redisgam_0, 2025). This implies a low print-run, low advertising, low export rates, and even less publisher confidence. It remains a mystery why, having already made them once before, Penguin would not reintroduce the Penguin India editions in more territories now that the clothbounds themselves are more profitable, especially considering that the clothbound Mahabharata is identical to the paperback edition in text and editorial notes. Physical examination of the Penguin India Mahabharata reveals significant differences from the European clothbounds, however. The binding is glued in sections rather than sewn onto the cloth, utilizing the paper of the paperback rather than the thicker paper in the clothbounds, and lacking a bookmark ribbon.

These are the oddities that contain the most clear meaning, but the more one looks, as evidenced in the spreadsheet as well as things I did not think would require tabs, the more oddities occur, more than I have the time to fully investigate. To whit: why does Brideshead Revisited have a different font than the other clothbounds? Why Inferno and not the other two portions of the Divine Comedy? Why does Bleak House record Dickens’ original installments and yet David Copperfield does not? Et cetera ad infinitum. All this serves a singular point: that despite the presence of uniformity in the exterior of the clothbounds, their interiors are radically divergent insofar as ink printed on paper can allow. Each individual clothbound can be said to make the editorial decisions that best suit the individual volume, but their interiors taken as aggregate betray the cohesiveness of the set that the exteriors attempt so hard to convey.

“Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told,” wrote Umberto Eco in the postscript to The Name of the Rose (1985). Here Eco refers to the postmodern idea that texts refer to other texts only and never to reality, but this is too the ethos of the clothbound classics. The clothbound Frankenstein speaks of the Penguin Black Frankenstein, which itself refers to the Penguin Black Frankenstein: the 1818 Text. These books refer to introductions, scholarship, historiographic metanarrative. Midway through the chain comes Mary Shelley rereleasing Frankenstein in 1832, once again I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper, further still down the chain she sits down in front of a manuscript and writes the words It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils and further still she sleeps under a darkened sky and dreams of monsters. The purpose of the clothbound is the panoramic view. As the chain recedes, Byron and Percy Shelley walk alongside, the clothbound scoops them up and drops them into frame. Mount Tambora erupts. The story of the creation of Frankenstein, just like the creation of his monster, has become canonized. The chain becomes Penguin Clothbound Canon.

Chapter 3: The Penguin Clothbound Canon

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

– Oscar Wilde, preface to The Picture of Dorian Grey (1891)

President of Harvard Charles Eliot had a longstanding theory that a complete liberal education could be provided in a five-foot shelf of books. What began as an educator’s assertion found its true appeal in marketing copy; eventually in 1909 the five-foot shelf came to fruition. (Beha, 2009) The idea has an enduring appeal; the Everyman website proudly proclaims that “with a hundred volumes a man may be intellectually rich for life” (Everyman, n. d.) Everyman having long since surpassed a hundred volumes seems to the concept immaterial. The Clothbound classics make no pretensions to providing a full liberal education. The most obvious point of contrast indicating this is that the clothbounds are a fiction line, whereas the Harvard classics are primarily not; Eliot being bound by contractual and marketing obligations to release the fiction line later, to significantly less attention (Beha, 2010).

Are classics and canon synonymous? In the introduction to the Everyman Classics edition of The Count of Monte Cristo, (Dumas, Eco, Washington, 2009) Umberto Eco begins with

The Count of Monte Cristo is being published in the Everyman edition, this work too now placed in the pantheon of the great, alongside Stendhal and Balzac. What more can one say? This is consecration, the acknowledgement that Monte Cristo is part of literary history. Must we therefore say that Dumas’ work is the equal of Scarlet and Black and Madame Bovary? That it is a ‘great novel?’ (Eco, p. 1)

In the following pages, Eco dissects his opinion on whether Monte Cristo is a ‘great novel’, citing its often rough prose, engorged length, but gripping plot and view of history, but never returns to the initial question of whether Everyman gets to make that decision. Thus, whilst Everyman consecrates Dumas in its pantheon, Eco consecrates the ability to make these decisions as belonging to Everyman, Alfred A. Knopf, and the requisite employed tastemakers.

Kelly Neubeiser quotes Sam Sacks in The New Yorker: “Authors are anointed not because they are great (although many of them are) but because they are important. In other words, the current criteria for classics are more a matter of sociology than of aesthetics” (Sacks, 2013, quoted in Neubeiser, 2015, p. 6). There is an implicit importance for the clothbound classic: they are the elite of the Penguin classics, according to the judgements of worth that are relative size and expense. Thus, they can be understood at a glance as not just sociologically important works, but a collection of what the publisher sees as the most sociologically important works. And taken from a sociological perspective, one must apply the foundational question of sociology to them: Are they racist?

Much of post-pandemic cultural discourse is taken in the discussion of whether things are ‘woke,’ an AAVE word in use since the 1930s, (Merriam-Webster, n.d.) that, appropriated by right-wing speakers has become a neologism that is complicated but not complex in its usage; complicated due to the almost infinite variation of definitions that range from attempting to maintain its anthropological hegemony-acknowledging origins to dismissive pejorative gesturing, and not complex because most if not all definitions can largely be boiled down to ‘left-wing.’ To try and find some objective measure as to whether the corpus as a whole could be considered woke, and with the full knowledge that analysing such a thing objectively is impossible as one undergraduate with imperfect information, I made a variation of the spreadsheet tallying various woke themes within enough of the clothbounds to create a broad average.

Findings: the clothbounds are predominantly written by European men of indeterminate sexuality with a large overarching view towards class divisions, gender roles, and the fin de siecle. Women and authors of colour are included, but to lesser degrees. It would be easy to label a collection of works of great literature that contains mainly white Europeans as asserting that non-white non-Europeans never wrote anything of value, but we must return to the interests of Penguin who, in the words of Stanley Unwin, “the first duty of any publisher to their authors is to remain solvent.” (Franklin, 2018) To return to Everyman and contrast comparable titles, The Divine Comedy (of which only Inferno, the most popular of the trilogy, has made it into the clothbound line) has sold significantly more than the Babur Nama. (Nielsen, Feb 12 2025) It is also unsurprising that a historical tally of authors in times where female and POC authors were disadvantaged shows a lack of women and authors of colour. To be short, well obviously.

In chapter one, Louttit’s assertion that the clothbounds are neo-Victorian products was mentioned. There is an inherent contradiction in this assertion, namely, that irrespective of the way the design of each book presents the series as neo-Victorian, many of the clothbounds are very much not. Tremble in fear: from beyond the grave, the Victorians have learned to colonize time.

The Everyman series now boasts 408 titles (Penguin, 2025),, implying that either the sum total of human knowledge has increased fourfold, or that the average human has become four times dumber. The Everyman’s Library editions we have today are less neo-Victorian and more Theseus-Victorian, the line having been started in 1906 by Joseph Malaby Dent, a bookseller born in 1849 “greatly influenced by the designs and private-press books of William Morris and T.J Cobden-Sanderson, and the title-pages and endpapers designed by Reginald L. Knowles” (ibid.). Over the years and acquisitions (particularly their 1991 relaunch) the Everyman Classics have changed shape in every way except substantially, in conscious opposition to trade paperbacks and the emergence of ebooks.

The idea of canon as curriculum opens the clothbounds to analysis through the lens of Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu’s view of the concept of curriculum lies within “the clear relation between taste and education, between culture as the state of that which is cultivated and culture as the process of cultivating” (Bourdieu, p. 38). Bourdieu sees taste as “a set of slight but systematic oppositions between the public-sector executives—more often originating from the working and lower classes, and closer to the engineers—and the private-sector executives—younger, generally of higher social origin… [who] choose Dali and Kandinsky rather than Vlaminck, Renoir and Van Gogh, … choose the Art of Fugue and the Concerto for the Left Hand rather than L’ Arlésienne, La Traviata, the Twilight of the Gods, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and Scheherazade; Aznavour, Françoise Hardy and Brassens rather than Bécaud, Piaf and Jacques Brel; philosophical essays and poetry rather than travel, history and the classics.” (Bourdieu, p. 329) Bourdieu further holds these divisions as the work of the education system in order to reinforce class boundaries through the distinction of taste.

The clothbounds present a literary history that is largely European and male, although more diverse than expected in terms of sexual orientation (to make a sweeping generalization, the best way to get a clothbound is to be a self-hating gay man).

As the clothbounds continue their dual progression from the Mycenaen era into the present, and to the same point from 2008, the paratext recedes. Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, republished in the clothbounds in 2024, lacks an introduction, endnotes, bibliography, chronology. The same happens to Brideshead Revisited, Pnin, Lolita, et cetera. The clearest common denominator in these titles is that these are still in copyright, where other titles have versions in the public domain (even if said versions are not the same as the ones included in the clothbounds).

It becomes clear that there can be no less than two canons at play when discussing the clothbound classics; an academic canon and a commercial canon. The academic canon is the canon discussed by academics; despite the Harvard Classics being curated to sell as a series they were at the end of the day the product of two men’s tastemaking- academic canon. The commercial canon is the canon of books that remain in print because of their continued lucrative value for publishers and retailers; this is where the clothbounds fit. They are two snakes in a cave eating each others’ tails.

Conclusion: The Clothbound Cave

California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.

– Homer, introduction to the Odyssey tr. E. V. Rieu (800BC)

It is a well known fact that people who spend significant time underground lose track of it. Beatriz Flammini, who in 2023 attempted to break the record for the longest underground isolation, reflected to The New Yorker reporter D. T. Max that “in the cave, the line of time disappears, and everything floats around you. A while ago I was born. A while ago I was going to visit Mongolia. There is no past, there is no future. Everything is present, everything is a while ago, and it’s all brutal and strange” (Max, 2024).

The Penguin Clothbound Classics are neo-Victorian postmodern products, designed to drape the collated literature of the past in Victorian livery. Their insides intend to teach about their time periods, their outsides provide a uniform ahistorical front. The stronger, more well-known names, the Shelleys, Stokers, Joyces and Wildes lend their prestige to their lesser known cousins, the Wyndhams, Baldwins, Selvons and Gaskells; each of whom, of course, are by virtue of their presence in cloth more notable than their nieces and nephews in paper, the Radclyffe Halls and Rachel Carsons and Thomas Manns and Émile Zolas of the world. Such a corpus relies on its recognition as an aggregate, and as such is built on and reinforces historic biases in recognition towards white European male voices, although such voices are often different colours of queer.

In a book not included in the clothbound classics, Socrates cries to Glaucon:

Behold! human beings living in a underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads… and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets… And if they were able to converse with one another, would they not suppose that they were naming what was actually before them? (Plato, Jowett, 2011)

The Clothbound Classics do not, of course, present a uniform history. Their paratext and their intention to induct the viewer into historical scholarship would not allow it. Every clothbound that possesses an introduction (as is the prerogative of the introducer) cares deeply about the context of each work, the progression from Paradise Lost to Frankenstein or comparing Dracula to Dorian Grey. But they do, when taken as a whole, look uniform. The other thing they look, and are, is expensive. The clothbounds elevate certain texts, ostensibly the most notable and influential but equally whichever Penguin like and can get away with into a place of superiority over the black-belted Penguin classics through the physical paratextual indicators of price and heft.

It is these physical factors and their design, rather than the text, that make the clothbound a vessel for aesthetic? No. The text and the design individually can both be considered vessels of connotative meaning, each of which strengthens the other, and allows the design on its own to appropriate the meaning of the clothbound aggregate when placed onto other texts.

The appearance of ahistoricity in the clothbound classics is because they are ahistoric: they are twenty-first century products first and foremost, designed to sell to the twenty-first century literary public. To do so, they take on the appearance of historicity, appealing to the aesthetics of Victorian home and lending libraries, playing into congruent themes and desires with those that drive Dark Academia aesthetics, and carrying a semiology that allows the reader to internalise those same values.

On Lolita, decked out in yellow cloth, Bickford-Smith capturing the off-gold in jagged, starstruck corporate-copy road signs, Patricia Lockwood writes that it “is the greatest novel ever written not about love, but about advertising. Nubile red-lipsticked America – revealed at the crucial moment to be already corrupt – is fondled by the hoary hand of Europe! The war is over, the country’s right pocket is unaccountably deep, the road into the future has just been repaved” (Lockwood, 2020). The Clothbound Classics operate on a nostalgia inherent to the classics, a desire to escape to a vivid, dramatic past, to be inducted into an educational dialogue, to hold not just a book but an artefact, to be learning but more importantly feel learned, to know Oscar Wilde more than Dorian Grey, to understand Mary Shelley’s holidays, to be able to discern the differences between the Robin Buss translation of Monte Cristo and its inferiors (Dumas, Buss, 2012); to know more about literature than the literate public, to become Tartt’s beautiful elite. “Lolita is powered not just by the nostalgia that is but by the nostalgia that will be,” Lockwood continues. “Nabokov knows that there will be people in the future who are not just hungry for sandwiches, but want to eat tuna salad on white, at a drugstore counter, in the year 1947.” (Lockwood, 2020)

Kelly Neubeiser called the classics a timeless genre, and it is clear that deliberate efforts have been made to keep them timeless, through design, material and textual tactics, even as their interiors attempt to produce an anachronistically twenty-first century rendition of each text. As Fredric Jameson writes in Postmodernism,

This situation evidently determines what the architecture historians call ‘historicism’, namely the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past, the play of random stylistic allusion, and in general what Henri Lefebvre has called the increasing primacy of the ‘neo’... It is for such objects that we may reserve Plato’s conception of the ‘simulacrum’—the identical copy for which no original has ever existed. (Jameson, 1989, pp. 65-66)

Jameson finishes with a reminder that “it should not be thought that this process is accompanied by indifference: on the contrary, the remarkable current intensification of an addiction to the photographic image is itself a tangible symptom of an omnipresent, omnivorous and well-nigh libidinal historicism” (ibid, p. 66). This is true of the clothbounds, and the Penguin Classics more broadly, they display a conscious and constant reverence for their source material, and the history they attempt to package and resell. These are artefacts made by lovers of literature for lovers of literature. Jameson continues: “Faced with these ultimate objects—our social, historical and existential present, and the past as ‘referent’—the incompatibility of a postmodernist ‘nostalgia’ art language with genuine historicity becomes dramatically apparent” (ibid, p. 67). The classics are historical fiction; the classics are ahistorical fiction. To quote Calvino: “A classic is a work which relegates the noise of the present to a background hum, which at the same time the classics cannot exist without” (p. 20).

In Pierce’s writing about BookTok, he takes issue with rampant commercialization, exclusion of choice and excessive performativity in the reading community. “There is an uncanny falseness behind it all, a showy nothingness that only approximates bibliophilia. Who doesn’t want to be seen as literary? Being perceived as having read a lot of books warrants a fair share of cultural capital. If you can fake it, then why not?” (Pierce, 2023) The clothbounds are exclusive, having a high price point and a limited selection of titles. They are performative in their designs– they are designed for display. They are, of course, commercialized, both in the sense that they are products produced commercially and sold for money, but also in the sense that they are performative and exclusive. Like all book covers, the clothbound part of the Penguin Clothbound is an advertisement. To put this to a critic like Pierce might provoke a reaction that this ‘uncanny falseness’ has penetrated the industry itself from outside as a novel threat, but as shown, this is how reading communities and the publishing industry have always worked. None of this is a problem, in fact this is Penguin and the publishing market broadly working as intended, but it highlights the disparity between, say, Calvino’s reader-first uncommercial definition of a classic and Neubeiser’s publisher-first advertising driven definition. There is a hypothetical case, although it would be the product of a separate definition to prove, that they are the same definition; that classic books are chosen by the literary community in educational, critical and private sectors to become classics because of their ability to bend historicity. Jameson continues:

What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods… now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation. (Jameson, p. 39)

In The Secret History, the cast are obsessed with the classics, but it is up to the villain, Henry Winter, the most obsessed, the most Dark Academia, to get tired of Virgil and Homer move to the Penguin India editions, the Bhagavad Gita, Mahabharata, Ramayana. Henry seeks the glory of the classics, an ancient mythologized past. He possesses an endless appetite for mythologies, and goes to murderous extremes to create a new mythology in an ancient vein. He is trying to create an infinite past. Art is commonly perceived to be above commerce. Great art, as the classics are considered, especially so. This is not true. Great art is commerce. Great art is great fiction.

End Matter

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Appendix 1: Clothbound Chart

Web link:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1fssdxp8Pk39wDwYUFkIjKghx3aHkNZu3Y_VCQbcoNsE/edit?usp=sharing