Penguin Little Black Classics

The irresistibly collectible box set of the first 80 Little Black Classics

In celebration of Penguin's 80th birthday, this box set of the first 80 books in the Little Black Classics series showcases the many wonderful and varied writers in Penguin Black Classics. From India to Greece, Denmark to Iran, and not forgetting Britain, this assortment of books will transport readers back in time to the furthest corners of the globe. With a choice of fiction, poetry, essays and maxims, by the likes of Chekhov, Balzac, Ovid, Austen, Sappho and Dante, it won't be difficult to find a book to suit your mood.

Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of the Penguin Classics list - from drama to poetry, from fiction to history, with books taken from around the world and across numerous centuries

The beautifully collectible box set of the first 80 Little Black Classic titles, ordered by the numbers on the spines.

The books included in the Little Black Classics Box Set are:

1. Mrs Rosie and the Priest - Giovanni Boccaccio
2. As kingfishers catch fire - Gerard Manley Hopkins
3. The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue - Anon
4. On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts - Thomas De Quincey
5. Aphorisms on Love and Hate - Friedrich Nietzsche
6. Traffic - John Ruskin
7. Wailing Ghosts - Pu Songling
8. A Modest Proposal - Jonathan Swift
9. Three Tang Dynasty Poets - Anon
10. On the Beach at Night Alone - Walt Whitman
11. A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees - Kenko
12. How to Use Your Enemies - Baltasar Gracián
13. The Eve of St Agnes - John Keats
14. Woman much missed - Thomas Hardy
15. Femme Fatale - Guy de Maupassant
16. Travels in the Land of Serpents and Pearls - Marco Polo
17. Caligula - Suetonius
18. Jason and Medea - Apollonius of Rhodes
19. Olalla - Robert Louis Stevenson
20. The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
21. Trimalchio's Feast - Petronius
22. How a Ghastly Story Was Brought to Light - Johann Peter Hebel
23. The Tinder Box - Hans Christian Andersen
24. The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows - Rudyard Kipling
25. Circles of Hell - Dante
26. Of Street Piemen - Henry Mayhew
27. The nightingales are drunk - Hafez
28. The Wife of Bath - Geoffrey Chaucer
29. How We Weep and Laugh at the Same Thing - Michel de Montaigne
30. The Terrors of the Night - Thomas Nashe
31. The Tell-Tale Heart - Edgar Allan Poe
32. A Hippo Banquet - Mary Kingsley
33. The Beautifull Cassandra - Jane Austen
34. Gooseberries - Anton Chekhov
35. Well, they are gone, and here must I remain - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
36. Sketchy, Doubtful, Incomplete Jottings - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
37. The Great Winglebury Duel - Charles Dickens
38. The Maldive Shark - Herman Melville
39. The Old Nurse’s Story - Elizabeth Gaskell
40. The Steel Flea - Nikolay Leskov
41. The Atheist’s Mass - Honoré de Balzac
42. The Yellow Wall-Paper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman
43. Remember, Body... - C.P. Cavafy
44. The Meek One - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
45. A Simple Heart - Gustave Flaubert
46. The Nose - Nikolai Gogol
47. The Great Fire of London - Samuel Pepys
48. The Reckoning - Edith Wharton
49. The Figure in the Carpet - Henry James
50. Anthem for Doomed Youth - Wilfred Owen
51. My Dearest Father - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
52. Socrates’ Defence - Plato
53. Goblin Market - Christina Rossetti
54. Sindbad the Sailor - Anon
55. Antigone - Sophocles
56. The Life of a Stupid Man - Ryunosuke Akutagawa
57. How Much Land Does a Man Need? - Leo Tolstoy
58. Leonardo da Vinci - Giorgio Vasari
59. Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime - Oscar Wilde
60. The Old Man of the Moon - Shen Fu
61. The Dolphins, the Whales and the Gudgeon - Aesop
62. Lips too chilled - Matsuo Basho
63. The Night is Darkening Round Me - Emily Brontë
64. To-morrow - Joseph Conrad
65. The Voyage of Sir Francis Drake Around the Whole Globe - Richard Hakluyt
66. A Pair of Silk Stockings - Kate Chopin
67. It was snowing butterflies - Charles Darwin
68. The Robber Bridegroom - Brothers Grimm
69. I Hate and I Love - Catullus
70. Circe and the Cyclops - Homer
71. Il Duro - D. H. Lawrence
72. Miss Brill - Katherine Mansfield
73. The Fall of Icarus - Ovid
74. Come Close - Sappho
75. Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands - Ivan Turgenev
76. O Cruel Alexis - Virgil
77. A Slip under the Microscope - H. G. Wells
78. The Madness of Cambyses - Herodotus
79. Speaking of Siva - Anon
80. The Dhammapada - Anon

Enshrining the fundamental rights and freedoms of its citizens in law, and curbing the power of those who rule them, the US constitution is one of the most significant documents in the history of democracy. New to Penguin's Little Black Classics series.

'No true Democracy has ever existed, nor ever will exist.'

In this selection from The Social Contract, Rousseau asserts that a state's only legitimate political authority comes from its people.

One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries - including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.

'Meanwhile, let us have a sip of tea. The afternoon glow is brightening the bamboos, the fountains are bubbling with delight, the soughing of the pines is heard in our kettle.'

In this charming book from 1906, Okakura explores Zen, Taoism, Tea Masters and the significance of the Japanese tea ceremony.

One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries - including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.

'This only they knew, that the kiss had destroyed him and the bath had destroyed her.'

In this beautiful Ancient Greek tale, Daphnis and Chloe are the inexperienced goatherd and shepherd who must face pirates, rivals and the confusion of their own feelings to find true love.

One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries - including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.

'It is only a bruise'

A carefree Russian official has what seems to be a trivial accident...

One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries - including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.

'Things are not simple but complex. If he bit Mr. Browning he bit her too. Hatred is not hatred; hatred is also love.'

Virginia Woolf's delightful biography of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning's spaniel, which asks what it means to be human - and to be dog.

One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries - including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.

'Ko-ax, ko-ax, ko-ax!
Now listen, you musical twerps,
I don't give a damn for your burps!'

A biting comedy from the great Ancient Greek playwright.

One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries - including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.

'A ghastly groan and a shudder..'

From the pioneer of horror fiction, this tale of a clergyman tormented by a demonic creature is one of the greatest Victorian ghost stories.

One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries - including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.

'We have nothing left in the world but what we can win with our swords.'

The remarkable account of Hannibal crossing the Alps with his elephants and winning the Battle of the Trebbia.

One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries - including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.

'And then he, completely astonished at her words, left off his lewdness, saying to her as many a man had done before, "Either you are a truly good woman or else a truly wicked woman." '

Brave, outspoken and guaranteed to annoy people wherever she went - including exasperated fellow pilgrims in Jerusalem and her long-suffering husband - Margery Kempe was one of the most vivid and unforgettable voices of the Middle Ages. Whether travelling alone, getting herself arrested or having visions of marrying Jesus, Margery repeatedly defied feminine convention - and also managed to compose the first autobiography in English, despite being unable to read or write.

One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries - including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.

'And when I shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars.'

This collection of Shakespeare's soliloquies, including both old favourites and lesser-known pieces, shows him at his dazzling best.

One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries - including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.

'Cut iron with iron,
What makes iron valuable,
Big kuku tree and big silk-cotton tree,
Fari and Kaunju -'

Told and retold since the fourteenth century, this West African epic chronicles the story of the mighty warrior who saves his people and founds an empire.

One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries - including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.

'Of what a mistake were you guilty in marrying a Man of his age! - just old enough to be formal, ungovernable and to have the Gout - too old to be agreable, and too young to die.'

The scheming and unscrupulous Lady Susan is unlike any Austen heroine you've met in this fascinating early novella.

One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries - including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.

'What matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now.'

A hugely influential collection for writers and artists of all kinds, Rilke's profound and lyrical letters to a young friend advise on writing, love, sex, suffering and the nature of advice itself.

One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries - including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.