Fred's Book Club: Itty Bitty.Books.

Welcome back to the Humpback Writers, the book feature that has little to do with humps or backs, or sometimes even writers, but always falls on Wednesday.

This week we have a twofer -- two miniature books from the great year of 1995 that are very different indeed. Actually it should be a fourfer, but I'll explain.

In 1995, the Penguin publishing company was celebrating its 60th anniversary, so they decided to do a run of little tiny books called Penguin 60s. In Penguin's ancestral home of the UK they released two sets of these, each with 60 books (a "black" set and an "orange" set, based on the spine colors), but in the US/Canada they just had one set of 60 in orange. I think they all retailed for 95 cents ($1.49 Canadian!) and were usually found near the cash registers, which is how I came to own these. I'm a sucker for impulse buys in bookstores. The books were either self-contained pieces (stories or essays) or excerpts from longer works. Writers included modern and past luminaries like Goethe, Will Self, Poe, Robertson Davies, Kipling, Patricia Highsmith, and so on. Penguin, of course, made its name beginning in 1935 as a publisher of paperback versions of good literature, intended to make the benefits of quality books available to all. You can see their original ten books here.

The company seems to have done similar anniversary series for their 70th and 80th anniversaries, but I think only in the UK. Whether they will do a 90th anniversary series in 2025, who knows. Impulse buys in bookstores don't move the way they used to, because there are fewer bookstores. I would doubt it anyhow. Penguin merged with Random House in 2013, and now the fabled publisher is a mere imprint. Nothing like a merger to wipe out a company's culture and history.

But the Penguin 60s series was fun, and played on the publisher's mixed history of classical literature and new books. Take for example the Milne Pooh book on the right; it takes pages from Winnie-the-Pooh, When We Were Very Young, and Now We Are Six. The Teachings of Jesus book contains excerpts from the King James Version of the New Testament written out as essays. I also have The Lives of the Saints, excerpted and translated from Fr. Omer Englebert's encyclopedic biography. These books are all 50 to 90 pages long, and fit in your shirt pocket or the palm of your hand.

I used to have a fourth book in the series, a story published previously by Stephen King in his 1993 collection Nightmares & Dreamscapes: Umney's Last Case. It's an interesting and weird detective novella. God knows what I did with it. Could be with the box of books in the cellar, or maybe I lent it to someone like an idiot. The story was adapted for TV in 2006 for TNT, starring William H. Macy.

So those are some of my small books, but these are not the smallest books I own; that pride of minuscule place still belongs to the baseball book I profiled here back in January. And, as I said earlier this month, aren't miniature things fun?