It's a little unfair to try and assign a grade to a life-spanning collection of essays like this one. By its very nature it has to run the gamut from Orwell's five-star smash hits like 'How the Poor Die', 'Politics versus Literature', and, of course, 'Politics and the English Language', through light, whimsical pieces such as 'Good Bad Books' or 'A Nice Cup of Tea', all the way to mechanical hackwork or tedious, failed conceits. (In the latter case I am thinking particularly of Orwell's 'Imaginary Interview' with Jonathan Swift, a style which has never, to my knowledge, been well done.) One can't very well assess the book as a whole, because it isn't. On the other hand, there is this to say: when Orwell is good, he is very good, and even when he is bad, he remains highly readable.
The collection, as a collection, is not as good. I do not want it thought that I am saying this is not a worthwhile book: it is. Simply by being an easily obtainable hardcover collection of Orwell's short and medium-length prose, it does a valuable service. Before this book came out, the only way to get a comprehensive collection of Orwell's essays in hardcover was to find a set of the four-volume "Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters" on the second-hand market, and the price demanded for that grows more exorbitant every year.
However, there are three major problems with the compilation. One is only slightly irritating, but the other two genuinely harm the utility of the book.
1. No page headings- This has been mentioned by other reviewers. The page headers say only "Essays", where in most other collections they would make mention of the essay you are currently reading. (This is true even of other Everyman's Library titles.) Because most of the pieces are short, you can easily flip back a page or two to find the title, but this grows tiresome fairly quickly, all the more so for the fact that the omission is so pointless.
2. No index of titles- This, to be fair, is not a fault of this one book. Rather, it is common to all Everyman's Library prose collections; I own volumes by Ernest Hemingway and Oscar Wilde, otherwise excellent, with the same problem. Because all the pieces are arranged chronologically, it is frustratingly hard to locate a specific essay; one has to guess where it fell in Orwell's career, turn to the table of contents, and run one's finger down the pages until one finds it. As the table of contents is seven pages long, this is inexcusably poor book design. My copy now sports Post-It notes sticking out the top for easy location of the major essays.
3. Footnotes- Orwell's footnotes have been converted into endnotes, and moved to the back of the book. This is not merely a case of editing for no good reason: it is plain wrong. Orwell's footnotes were invariably parenthetical, comprising asides from and elucidations of the main text; moreover, there are only thirty-eight of them in the book. There is no excuse for not putting them at the bottom of the page, where they belong. There they can be seen in the context of the essays, without requiring you to stop in mid-paragraph and flip to the back of a two-and-a-half-inch-thick book.
Other reviewers and the book's own publicity hype tout this as "the best one-volume collection of Orwell available". It is not, not by a long shot. It is certainly the most comprehensive. However, the _best_ one-volume Orwell is the "Collected Essays" which was first published in 1961 and has subsequently been reprinted many times. It is inexplicably hard to obtain in the U.S., but can be had from amazon.co.uk under the title "George Orwell: Essays". It gathers all of Orwell's major pieces without the ephemera; for the already dedicated Orwellphile, it is a delight to have all 80 numbers of 'As I Please' in one place, but for the reader new to Orwell, they are clutter.
Instead, this is the book you buy to keep on your bookshelf for the rest of your life and wear out with frequent consultation. It is a reference volume; the only time one might try to read it cover-to-cover would be on a very long flight. (I have done this, with great success.)
The most frustrating thing about this collection is how close it came to indispensibility. Had it been slightly better designed and edited, it would have been _the_ collection of Orwell's essays, required purchasing for every serious Orwell fan. (Save, perhaps, the manic completists who will settle for nothing less than the twenty-volume "Collected Works.") It is still worth your money, but so little effort would be required to make even more valuable that one must wonder why that effort was not invested.
Overall: A-, 9/10.
