Great Ideas

I was at Books-a-Million last night and saw this lovely display of twelve beautiful printed books, with embossed covers and antique fonts—just exactly the types of book design that appeals to me. Penguin Books now has a new series called Great Ideas. Guess what, though? Not one of those twelve books was by a woman. Every single one was a western white male. Guess no woman ever had a great idea, huh? No Mary Wollestonecraft at least? Not to mention any person of color?

Evidently since the books first were published, Penguin has published some additional texts and they’ve added Wollestonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Virginia Woolfe’s A Room of One’s Own—but they were certainly not in the stand I saw at BAM last night. And still no writers of color. Do I need to draw conclusions about this? I don’t think so.