Dover Thrift Editions in Paperback

[Razeus]

Are these any good? These are extremly cheap and I'm about to order A TON of books from this series. It's gonna save me a lot of cash in the future. What do you guys think?

[ajoe]

It depends on what you mean by "good." I think they're the actual unabridged version, but they have no footnotes whatsoever that might help you in understanding the text.

[Erna]

I have some of this series and I like them. The text is the original version and the layout is easy readable. Okay, there are no notes, but I never read books with notes. All my classics are in cheap editions without notes.

[armenian]

these are so cheap, im skeptically that somethings wrong with them like the cheap penguin books.

anybody got any experience with them

[Charles Darnay]

I have had a hit/miss relation with them.

I have their version of Cyrano de Bergerac, which is fantastic - layout, cover, print, unabridged, well translated.

I have "The Trial and Death of Socrates" - same story

I have the Iliad and Odyssey which are just awful - terrible print and terrible translation. Is that the fault of Dover, probably not, probably the translator.

They're not my favourite edition, but they are not bad either.

[armenian]

i was looking into this
http://www.amazon.com/Metamorphosis-Other-Stories-Thrift-Editions/dp/0486290301/ref=rsl_mainw_dpl?ie=UTF8&m=ATVPDKIKX0DER

[capek]

Wow, and it seems like a lot of them are eligible for the 4 for three promotion, so if you buy a bunch at the same time, every 4th one is free. I might have to go through the selection and see if there are any I need.

[stlukesguild]

Dover Books is a fabulous publisher. Their "thrift editions" can't be beat for cost and are as well bound as almost any discount paperback. You cannot beat them when purchasing a work that doesn't need translation: Shakespeare's plays, Austen's novels, Conrad, Melville, Dickinson, etc... Dover maintains the low price in these thrift editions by publishing books that are no longer under copy-write... thus the original or the translation must pre-date 1923. You can't beat these books for a solid intro into the great English-language poets: Dickinson, Emerson, Whitman, Yeats, Keats, Shelley, Blake, Byron, Coleridge, Marvell, Donne, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Houseman, Edgar Lee Masters... even T.S. Eliot. I must admit that they provided my introductions to many of these poets, and in spite of having purchased more complete anthologies... often hardbound... since then, I still have numerous Dover poetry volumes on my shelves.

Dover also has a marvelous collection of English-language fiction writers: Melville, Austen, Kate Chopin, Henry James, Hawthorne, R.L. Stevenson, Charles Dickens, H.G. Wells, etc... I would especially promote Dover books for their selections from mid/late 19th century (Victorian) literature (Kipling, Wells, Bierce, Walpole, Rossetti, William Morris, etc...) as well their selections of older classic ghost/horror tales: Poe, Hawthorne, Ambrose Bierce, J.S. LeFanu, Arthur Conan Doyle, G.K. Chesterton, Algernon Blackwood, etc... To this I would certainly recommend any number of their art books... posters, etc... I first came across Dover books at a small book store that carried many of their publications, but I soon discovered that the best way to check them out is to receive their catalog... which I have found to be much easier to utilize than the web page, although you can certainly check them out here:
http://store.doverpublications.com/index.html

[capek]

Cool! I bought 12 books on amazon for $22 shipped after the 4 for 3 discount. Very nice.