Boyd Tonkin: A Week in Books

What keeps writers alive beyond their mortal span? Not plaques, museums or monuments, but the ability of ordinary readers to enjoy their work in affordable and accessible formats. It would hardly bother the shade of Graham Greene that (as I spotted on holiday last week) Chez Félix by the old port in Antibes - where he lunched daily for decades - still looks like a workaday café that most tourists ignore on the way to the Provençal market round the corner. And neither could the spirit of F Scott Fitzgerald take any comfort from the natty marble slab that now marks his "all too transitory" spell of Riviera bliss in a villa on the site of the Hotel Belles-Rives at Juan-les-Pins.

By itself, the heritage business has no power to make great books any less transitory than the moods and deeds that gave rise to them. For all their faults and fads, only publishers can manage that. So we should forgive a lot of the absurd razzmatazz that strikes up whenever they try to market old books as brashly as they do new ones.

The Penguin Classics list has just celebrated its 60th birthday season by wrapping some of its glorious galaxy of titles into five-piece bundles with come-on labels such as "the best sex" - or "subversion", or "tear-jerkers", or "adultery" - "ever written". Fitzgerald himself scores two hits in the "best decadence" section, for The Great Gatsby and The Beautiful and the Damned.

Sometimes these sets have a crazy sort of logic to them. The "best journeys" class trippily unites The Odyssey with On the Road, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Three Men in a Boat and The Grapes of Wrath. Others seem to have been picked more for silliness than similarity. The Canterbury Tales joins Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs in the "best sex" division, prompting thoughts of some bitch-goddess summit between whip-wielding Wanda and the Wife of Bath.

Lovers of these books may wince or cringe. Pedants will suggest that one plausible definition of a "classic" is precisely a work that escapes from every generic or thematic pigeonhole. But Penguin is - justifiably - aiming to reach the sort of casual purchaser who may not have dipped a toe into the often chilly-looking "classics" sea since school. To deploy the summer's media buzz-phrase, this semi-serious rebracketing intends to twist the "long tail" of a vast and rich backlist into some freshly appealing shapes.

No tail in publishing is longer, or broader, than the Penguin Classics catalogue. However, issues of copyright mean that it can't quite stretch into every literary corner. Graham Greene makes no appearance in the Penguin inventory - you have to go to Vintage Classics for the sage of Antibes. From Colette to Thomas Mann (both also Vintage stars), various 20th-century icons have dropped out of the Penguin empire. Yet no other classics roster - not even the superb Everyman's Library - can ever begin to match its scope and depth.

The current campaign packages Penguin's treasures as a squad of world-beating performers - record-holders for love (Wuthering Heights), laughter (Diary of a Nobody) or lunacy (One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest). There are other ways to read the classics, and one is to seek a brighter illumination of the present. On the shores of the Cap d'Antibes, grand pine-sheltered villas guard their owners' secrets. One of the swankiest now belongs to Roman Abramovich and, from its gardens, Chelsea's patron can gaze onto suitably azure waves. Before long, I hope, a gifted novelist will turn the historical dramas that brought him and his like here into a classic of the future. And whoever does that will need to absorb the insight and the outlook both of Scott Fitzgerald and of Graham Greene. Any classic worth its rank will get to the heart of the matter - and then transplant that heart across the seas of time.