Signet Classic

Signet Classic belongs to the New American Library, the American paperback house that Victor Weybright and Kurt Enoch founded in New York in 1948. NAL put its first Signet and Mentor books on sale on 25 February 1948, in some eighty thousand stores and newsstands, under the slogan "Good Reading for the Millions." Signet was the line for newer writers, and the house's early lists carried William Faulkner, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal and George Orwell. Mentor took on older material such as The Iliad and Moby Dick. The Library of Congress records Signet Classic as an NAL imprint under what was then Penguin USA, and Penguin Random House lists Signet Classics among its imprints today.

The imprint reprints established literature in inexpensive paperback form. By one encyclopedic account, the range runs from Giovanni Boccaccio to Sinclair Lewis. The books come with a critical introduction and, in newer editions, an afterword. In the 1960s it was also the home of the Signet Classic Shakespeare, edited under Sylvan Barnet, which issued the plays one paperback at a time. They were later gathered into a single volume.

On WebToTell, the book from this imprint is D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. The Signet Classics edition (ISBN 9780451531957) appeared in October 2011. It is sold as the authorized unexpurgated text and has an introduction by the critic Geoff Dyer and an afterword by the Lawrence scholar John Worthen. That pairing shows how the imprint usually works: a famous, often contested book, set between a contemporary reader's introduction and a scholar's closing note.

A reader who picks up a Signet Classic can expect a compact mass-market paperback of a recognised title, framed by an essay before the text and often another after it. For a novel like Lawrence's, which was long known mainly by its reputation, those pages give useful context before the story itself.