Books in the Top Five Classics series

This Top Five Classics illustrated edition of Dickens’ immortal holiday classic, A Christmas Carol, includes the original color illustrations by John Leech, as well as another 20 woodcut engravings by Sol Eytinge Jr. from the 1869 American edition by Ticknor & Fields. Beautifully designed and carefully edited, this hardcover edition also includes a short introduction and bio.Ebenezer Scrooge, a miserly old curmudgeon who spurns Christmas as a “humbug,” is given the chance to redeem himself through the intervention of four spirits on Christmas Eve—the ghost of his former partner, Jacob Marley, and the Spirits of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet To Come. The story not only reformed Scrooge, it transformed the way we celebrate the Holiday itself. If reading Dickens’ most beloved story doesn’t put you in the true spirit of Christmas, you may very well be beyond hope.As Scrooge’s nephew Fred said, “I have always thought of Christmas time...as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.”Or as Tiny Tim put it more succinctly, “God Bless Us, Every One!”

This Top Five Classics illustrated edition of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights includes the complete, unabridged text; 12 starkly beautiful woodcut illustrations by renowned artist Clare Leighton (which were the inspiration for the sets of the classic 1939 Laurence Olivier-Merle Oberon film adaptation), as well as a helpful introduction, detailed author bio, and bibliography.Wuthering Heights was released in 1847 in the shadow of the instantly successful Jane Eyre, published two months earlier by her older sister Charlotte. It enjoyed only mixed reviews--but the reactions were intense, foreshadowing the eventual stature the novel would claim in the pantheon of English literature, surpassing in many readers' eyes even her sister's magnum opus. Though Emily would not live to see it, Wuthering Heights would become synonymous with passionate gothic romance and tragic love, establishing Heathcliff and Catherine as the most poignantly doomed couple in fiction since Romeo and Juliet, but with even darker consequences for everyone involved.