Dover Thrift Editions

[Voivod30]

My local Mr. Paperback has these on display in the "classics" section of the store. They are all unabridged and prices range from one dollar to four dollars and fifty cents. I love these editions because even when I'm broke and only have five dollars to my name I can still count on finding a couple of new stories to add to my collection. Most are novellas, short story collections or poems but there are a few short novels as well. Any way so far I've purchased: The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories (Kipling), The Overcoat and Other Short Stories (Gogol), Heart of Darkness (Conrad), Civil Disobedience and Other Essays (Thoreau), Lyric Poems, (Keats), Around the World In Eighty Days (Verne), The Red Badge of Courage (Crane), Gulliver's Travels (Swift), Essay On Man and Other Poems (Pope), Treasure Island (Stevenson), The Gambler (Dostoyevsky), The Invisible Man (Wells), The Immoralist (Gide), Journey To the Center of the Earth (Verne), Where Angels Fear to Tread (Forster), The Time Machine (Wells), The Country of the Blind and Other Science-Fiction Stories (Wells), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson), The Island of Dr. Moreau (Wells), Pride and Prejudice (Austen), Aeneid (Vergil), The Country of the Pointed Firs (Jewett), Death in Venice (Mann), Notes From the Underground (Dostoyevsky), A Room With a View (Forster), Green Tea and other Ghost Stories (LeFanu), The Importance of Being Earnest (Wilde), White Fang (London), Silas Marner (Eliot), Othello (Shakespeare), Ethan Frome (Wharton), The Double (Dostoyevsky), The Trial and Death of Socrates (Plato), The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories (Twain), Beowulf, The War of the Worlds (Wells), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce), The School for Scandal (Sheridan), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain), The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Other Poems (Coleridge). Any way, I was just curious if any one has any suggestions on what I should pick up next and opinions on translations of the non-English, old-English editions.

[stlukesguild]

Dover is great. I still have a good many Dover editions in my library. One way in which they keep the price down is through the publication of books in the public domain which are no longer copyright protected thus saving on costs of royalties. As a result, most of the translations of non-English works employ older translations. Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat employs the great Fitzgerald translation... but I can't speak to the quality of most of the rest of the translations. Most of the Greek and Latin texts can be found inexpensively enough in good translations through used bookstores or online. The same is true of most of the central works of European literature. I would focus especially on the English language works with Dover. Perhaps expand out to more of the poetry collections. They were great introductions to Blake, Keats, Byron, Donne, etc...

[Dinkleberry2010]

The Dover editions are especially good in publishing entire volumes of certain poets (such as A.E. Housman and Gerard Hopkins) at a reasonable, even cheap, price.

[mal4mac]

Dover are great.

Some of the translations aren't that old, for instance Payne's translation of Schopenhauer's the World as Will and Representation is from 1957 -- this is the translation most scholars still recommend (e.g. Bryan Magee in "Schopenhauer" and "Confessions")

You might like Schopenhauer as he influenced several of the writers you mention (Conrad, Mann...) But he can be tough to chew, so get Magee to help you along.

I have Heath Robinson's translation of Euclid in Dover, which is from the early 20th century, and is still considered "the standard". It's another tough chew though, be prepared to skip some of H-R's introduction, it's harder than Euclid himself...!

Dover use the Maudes' translation for at least some of Tolstoy's work -- my preferred translators (and many other people's, including Tolstoy himself!)

Dover publish *a lot* of textbooks that more expensive publishers have discontinued -- Morris Kline's works on the History of Mathematics are well worth a look, if you are interested in that area.

The paper quality that Dover use is very good, for the price, much better than what Penguin and similar publishers use -- Dover say "it will not discolor or become brittle with age", and that has been my experience. This might make them first choice for buying the old classics that everyone publishes.

[Pecksie]

I own quite a few. Good inexpensive editions, even if the introductions aren't as good as those of, for instance, Penguin's.

[mal4mac]

By the way, the Euclid translation is by Heath not Heath Robinson. Heath's introduction is somewhat Heath Robinson (unlikely, incredibly detailed, complicated!) -- hence my Freudian slip :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Heath_Robinson