In September 2024, Penguin doubled down on one of the most striking publishing bets of the decade: the continued expansion of its Famous Classics imprint, a series of beautifully designed editions of public-domain works that had become the unlikely engine of growth for physical books in an era of screens and short-form attention.
The series, with its instantly recognisable covers, had discovered that a new generation of readers, many of them discovering classics through TikTok’s BookTok community, would pay premium prices for elegant editions of Dostoevsky, Austen and Woolf. The imprints success was part of a broader renaissance in physical books, whose sales had proved remarkably resilient against streaming and e-readers.
Publishing executives increasingly saw the trend as a counterweight to the doom-laden narratives about the death of reading, and the decision to expand the series into more languages and more titles reflected a belief that the audience for serious, lasting writing was growing, not shrinking. The bet was simple, and quietly radical: that the books that had survived a century or more would survive the internet too.