This year is Penguin Books’ 70th Anniversary, so when I read this story, in The Guardian a few weeks ago, I got quite excited.

In May it will release the Pocket Penguins, 70 paperbacks priced at �1.50 from classic and contemporary authors.

Oooh. Which books are they publishing? It might be fun collecting the lot? There were no real clues in The Guardian piece. So next stop the Penguin website where I was only able to find this:

To celebrate its 70th birthday in 2005, Penguin is publishing 70 Pocket Penguins by authors ranging from Homer and Anton Chekhov to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jamie Oliver. At just �1.50 each they follow Allen Lane’s ethos of making great writing affordable and available to everybody – now you can own a piece of the Penguin story.

Some interesting sounding authors. But I want a nice big list. Finally, Amazon came, partially, to the rescue, with a search for “Pocket Penguins 70’s” (couldn’t work out how to link to the results of a search).
This reveals that many of the titles are actually extracts from other works, in most instances readable as standalone pieces. So much like those Penguin 60s that came out a couple of years ago.