Candide or Optimism (Penguin Classics)

Winner of the 2014 Type Directors Club Communication Design Award

Praise for Penguin Drop Caps:

[Penguin Drop Caps] convey a sense of nostalgia for the tactility and aesthetic power of a physical book and for a centuries-old tradition of beautiful lettering.
--Fast Company

Vibrant, minimalist new typographic covers.... Bonus points for the heartening gender balance of the initial selections.
--Maria Popova, Brain Pickings

The Penguin Drop Caps series is a great example of the power of design. Why buy these particular classics when there are less expensive, even free editions of Great Expectations? Because they're beautiful objects. Paul Buckley and Jessica Hische's fresh approach to the literary classics reduces the design down to typography and color. Each cover is foil-stamped with a cleverly illustrated letterform that reveals an element of the story. Jane Austen's A (Pride and Prejudice) is formed by opulent peacock feathers and Charlotte Bronte's B (Jane Eyre) is surrounded by flames. The complete set forms a rainbow spectrum prettier than anything else on your bookshelf.
--Rex Bonomelli, The New York Times

Drool-inducing.
--Flavorwire

Classic reads in stunning covers--your book club will be dying.
--Redbook

By his mid-thirties his literary activities precipitated a four-year exile in England where he won the praise of Swift and Pope for his political tracts. His publication, three years later in France, of Lettres philosophiques sur les Anglais (1733)--an attack on French Church and State--forced him to flee again. For twenty years Voltaire lived chiefly away from Paris. In this, his most prolific period, he wrote such satirical tales as Zadig (1747) and Candide (1759). His old age at Ferney, outside Geneva, was made bright by his adopted daughter, Belle et Bonne, and marked by his intercessions in behalf of victims of political injustice. Sharp-witted and lean in his white wig, impatient with all appropriate rituals, he died in Paris in 1778--the foremost French author of his day.