81 111 Platypus's
Paperbacks
pissorted Penguins were dropped in n,,YPus's burrow this week, and ""s ancient hydromorph looked Ze,rri over with a friendly if desrt, `1-Ing eye. For in volume, if noth, crg else, they demand too much al. even the most well-initioned of critics. This week, for
s,Iance, Penguins have started to
°.lish the collected works of V. S. orliPaul and Richard Condon. J can. pi 'Y name names at the moment, i'nce even to list the titles would 11411 this column into an index, But it resist mentioning the re
Iles of PQ, Wodehouse which are
aPPearing. If there is one nap:aarservice which Penguins have ,rformed, it is to have helped im alise his young fellows and bt.111,,nlY fish, good eggs and greasy ti2.48. Platypus has been reading Tile reissued version of The Luck Of ishe Bodkins (Penguin 40p). Which oiall the world knows, the saga br ivitss Lotus Blossom, Mr Am 0o* Tennyson and Mr Monty tlm kin,
"ext, a rummy egg from the '-'1„ellguin English Library series (I o never work out how one book _
gets into one series and not another, but this is by the way): Edward Trelawney's Records of Shelley, Byron and the Author (40p). The book isn't so much memorable for Trelawney's vivid if , somewhat exaggerated narration of events, as for the character of Trelawney himself. He was a strong-willed but gullible adventurer who became passionately attached to the poetry and then the persons of Shelley and Byron. For anyone else, the transition from print to flesh would have been an anti-climax. But Trelawney makes Romantic heroes of them all. Including himself. A good read for those who like diarists with more spice than incense I was surprised to discover that Henry James's The Ambassadors is being published for the first timet by Penguin Modern Classics, at the modern price of 50p. It is one of the last novels, and you can expect more than the usual length and elaboration. In contrast, you can read the long and elaborate Theory Of Literature (95p), by Rene Wellek and Austin Warren. This is part of
a new' series, titled rather grandly Penguin University Books. Which is a ragbag of those books too academic tor the Pelican series, and too arch for anything else. In this one, Wellek and Warren propound _a theory which Platypus once read and has now forgotten.
In a not dissimilar vein., Pelican have reissued Raymond Williams's Drama From Ibsen to Brecht (75p), a survey, of the modernist movement in the Western theatre. It is full of academic knots like "structure of feeling." But Williams's ,style is lucid not to say contrived. It is meant to be one of these ' committed ' books, but I can't see the ushers selling it before the curtain.
Finally this week, an updated and reissued version of Who's Who in the Ancient World (Penguin 60p), if such a thing is remotely possible. It has been compiled by Betty Radice; who -must certainly know her stuff. From Achates to ZeuxiS,!with maps and photographs en route. When.I. was a choolboy; these books were frowned upon as being too peneral. 'They weren't even any got;t1 as cribs, So who reads them? The Shades? With this final thought, Platypus will creep back into his own shade and deyour the the other hundred paperbacks which are waiting for him,
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