Ten years on from Penguin 60s comes Penguin 70, increasing from 64 pages to 96, with 32 lines per portrait page set in Mardersteig's 11.5 on 14.5 Monotype Dante. Alluring and fashionable, Penguin again comes of age, ringing the changes with these delectable intellectual biscuits in fetching, bite-sized coatings "wherever good books are sold".
And what of the content? Who's in and who's out? What's on offer to our attenuated attention spans in this age of attrition?
Ireland - let us be chauvinistic - is represented by one voice, Marian Keyes's, with Nothing Bad Ever Happens in Tiffany's, a sprightly gathering of "tales and observations" from Cara magazine and Abroad. In 1995 our ambassadors were Frank O'Connor, Saki (we claim him), William Trevor and Oscar Wilde.
A core of old staples remain: Chekhov, Freud, Mortimer, Nabakov, Self, Spark, Theroux, Trevor, Updike. Poets too have their say: Simon Armitage, Tony Harrison and Roger McGough. But where are the modern classics, the dead yet so alive - Auden, MacNeice, Lowell, Hughes, Larkin? With ratios of 23/60 in 1995 and 40/70 in 2005, contemporaneity rules. And of the pre-20th century writers? Eleven out of 60 in 1995, three out of 70 today (Homer, Flaubert, Chekhov). What is a classic after all? What endures through our amnesiac fog?
In 2005 Anglo-American hegemony obtains. Where are the works of living writers in translation, what's the news from abroad? France, Germany, South America (Márquez excepted), Asia and Africa fall silent. But let us celebrate, or cerebrate, for here be the divine Nabokov, Sebald, Borges (though no Joyce) and those avatars of the information era, new historians Beevor, Cannadine, Ferguson and Schama. The Lady Chatterley Trials (No 1 of 70) introduces the modern world as we know it. Other merchandisers of fact - popular scientists, eco-watchers, cultural commentators - include Eric Schlosser, Richard Dawkins, India Knight, Elizabeth David, Stephen Pinker, Michael Moore, Chomsky, O'Hanlon, de Botton, tilting away from the literature-dominated selections of 1995. Yet here still be some lords of creation: Kunzru, Hornby, Safran Foer, Eggers, Coe. Penguin has justly earned its narcissism. May it continue to divert, instruct, edify.
Penguin 70: The Boxed Set costs £105, or £1.50 individually