Damrosch takes Jules Verne's 1873 novel, Around the World in 80 Days, as his model for his 80-book global roundup of both classic and modern literary works. Damrosch quotes The Golden Ass by Apuleius at the end of his introduction, "Lector, intende: laetaberis: Attend, reader, and you will find delight".

Damrosch's descriptions of his 80 books are covered in 16 chapters, each with five authors, organised under two headings: Cities, such as London, Paris or Krakw, or Regions such as Tokyo -Kyoto, Shanghai- Beijing, "Brazil-Colombia" and "The Antilles and Beyond". To give a flavour of the content, under the header, "Tehran-Shiraz", Damrosch covers books by Marjane Satrapi; Farid ud-Din Attar; poets of Shiraz; Ghalib and Agha Shahid Ali. Unfortunately, Australia and New Zealand miss out completely, even though Damrosch includes countries not on Phileas Fogg's fictional itinerary.

Damrosch's comments are often eclectic, interspersed with personal details and family history, but always interesting. He begins his travels in London with Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and ends with Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, a work "that can awaken and guide our moral sympathies". He believes we need "literature as a refuge in troubled times", as he roams across genres that "have responded to times of crisis".

Damrosch often chooses books "in dialogue with one another" which provides some unusual couplings, such as P.G. Wodehouse and Franz Kafka and linking 17th-century Japanese poet Basho with The Simpsons. He determines not to simply tell a one-sided story by the victors of history, so he documents, for example, nahuatl Aztec poetry and Derek Walcott's writings on colonial oppression and racial inequality

Henry Eliot, the author of The Penguin Classics Book, has a sumptuous new compilation, The Penguin Modern Classics Book (Penguin Books, $65), which describes the over 1800 Penguin modern classic paperbacks that have been published from April, 1961 to April, 2021. In just over 600 pages, Eliot covers 600 authors, labelled by the publishers as "modernist pioneers, avant-garde iconoclasts, radical visionaries and timeless storytellers".

Each entry is accompanied by a book and author description and a cover illustration. The biographical descriptions are often eclectic. Elliot notes that Isabel Colegate, author of The Shooting Party, lived in Midford Castle, "a Gothic folly shaped like a giant ace of clubs", while Boris Vian, the author of Froth on the Daydream, "died of a heart attack while attending a screening of an unsatisfactory film adaptation of his 1946 book, I Will Spit on your Graves".

In relation to Penguin cover design, Eliot says, "From the beginning, built into the DNA of Penguin, has been this idea that the books need to be beautifully designed". Early illustrators included David Gentleman, Michael Ayrton and a young Quentin Blake, but after 1963, says Eliot, the designers "began to increasingly use existing artworks - the idea being that the cover artwork was roughly contemporaneous with the text". Thus, a 1964 cover of Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse features a work by fellow Bloomsbury Group member, the artist Duncan Grant.

Henry Eliot is conscious of the problems of defining a modern classic: "It's a really slippery term...the definition I find the most helpful is from Ezra Pound. He said that a classic is classic not because of any structural rules or criteria that it meets, but because of a certain internal and irrepressible freshness. And that rings true to me."

Nonetheless that freshness is restricted by gender and geography. Four-fifths of the authors are men, and nine out of 10 are white The book, which is arranged by country, reflects a Western northern hemisphere predominance, especially for authors from the British Isles and North America. China only has three authors, while the North Africa section has only one book, Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North.

The Australia section contains 12, mostly deceased, authors, with Patrick White the numeric standout. The only contemporary authors are Helen Garner and Robert Drewe. No Richard Flanagan or Tim Winton here. New Zealand only has four authors - Katherine Mansfield, Ruth Park, Ian Cross and Patricia Grace.

Eliot recognises these deficiencies, and the original Penguin publishing decisions would've been determined by which countries they were published in and authorial copyright availability. Eliot indicates these the issues will be taken into consideration regarding future choices: "The task of a classics publisher is to identify these imbalances and redress them".

Despite the criticisms of a lack of balance in global coverage, The Penguin Modern Classics Book is a beautifully printed and illustrated hardback, which will provide many hours of engrossing bibliophilic browsing.