Penguin Clothbound Classics | An Illustrated Bibliography

Are there any rare volumes?

Yes! The rarest volume is the first printing of Crime and Punishment, one of the first 10 titles released in 2008. The red foiled design on fawn covers for this initial print run caused problems at the printing press, and so it ended up having to be hand-foiled. Because of this, there was only a limited print run of this volume and it is the rarest volume in the series. The title was later reprinted in 2018 with a black linen binding (which is not a rare edition). The 2008 edition of Madame Bovary also went out of print and a newer edition was reprinted in 2014. Several of the India Special Editions are currently out of print, as are the Proust series. If you include the out-of-series volumes, the Tibetan Book of the Dead is also very hard to track down. In addition, some books were reprinted with slightly differing cloth covers (e.g. Great Expectations covers can look navy or blue-black), and the earliest printings on the first 10 books are differentiated by having numbers on the spines (as you can see in the image above) which later printings lack. Where possible, the relevant isbns for these rare editions are listed below to help you find them if you’re completing a collection.