Two of Britain's biggest book publishers are locked in a battle for control of the lucrative literary classics market. Penguin is the leading classics publisher, with its familiar black or silver-spined series accounting for about 65% of all classics sold in the UK. But next summer rival Random House will launch an audacious bid for a slice of those sales.
Random House's literary paperback list Vintage already boasts authors such as Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan. Now their major novels will be repackaged as Vintage Classics, alongside giants such as Swift, Tolstoy, Dickens and the Brontes.
The Vintage Classics will have fresh cover designs with "iconic" images, which the publisher believes will contrast with the often more traditional Penguin covers. Introductions will be written by novelists and journalists rather than academics. Random House's move is the most aggressive so far in the classics publishing war, which has seen publishers employ modish marketing tricks to re-sell backlist titles. This year Jane Austen was controversially rebranded in the style of a "contemporary women's romance author", and soon Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes will be reborn as a rival to Inspector Morse.
Penguin has responded with ranges of cheaper, more populist Red Classics, a multicoloured 60th anniversary series, and even limited-edition Designer Classics, with handmade covers by Sir Paul Smith and Manolo Blahnik.
This war is partly provoked by chain booksellers, who have reduced stock ranges and made it harder for new writers to gain the shelf space guaranteed to classic authors. Such writers are also mercifully free of advance payments, royalties or prima donna tendencies.
Random House also fears that when work by its acclaimed 20th century writers such as Angela Carter, John Fowles and Iris Murdoch slips out of copyright - 70 years after their deaths - it will be absorbed by the Penguin Classics list. "If we don't do this now, eventually everything will belong to Penguin," said Rachel Cugnoni, publishing director of Vintage. "We're really the only other house that can take them on."
Adam Freudenheim, classics publisher at Penguin, said that the rival list had much ground to make up: "We have over 800 black classics and 500 modern classics in print, we continue to bring out new translations and editions, and we've just had our best ever year for sales. Vintage might publish Middlemarch, for example, but will they do all George Eliot's work?"
The red-spined Vintage Classics will be launched with 20 titles in August 2007, including Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Middlemarch, Gulliver's Travels, Oliver Twist, Tom Jones and the complete Grimm's Fairy Tales. By Christmas 2007 there will be 50 titles on the list.
To design the new covers, Vintage showed competing sets of classics to focus groups of "archetypal ABC1 readers". The groups felt Oxford University Press titles were "quite forbidding and academic"; Penguin Classics had a "stamp of quality and collectability, but look as if they'll be hard going"; and some other new-look classics were "patronising".
Vintage then trialled prototypes of its rebranded classics, only to be told that readers wanted more "simple and approachable" jackets. The publisher eventually chose a single "iconic" image for each cover. "We want them to appeal to people who might be going into a bookshop to buy Zadie Smith's new novel," Ms Cugnoni said. "So they need to be fresh, classy and tasteful." The marketing campaign for the series will have a bigger budget than the launch of a new thriller by Dan Brown or Thomas Harris.
Random House has also swooped on P G Wodehouse, whose paperbacks have long been published by Penguin.
In a deal with the Wodehouse estate, it will re-release all of Wodehouse's 43 books in 2008, promising "to revitalise the sales of one of the world's greatest writers of humour".
Top classics 2006
1 War and Peace Leo Tolstoy
2 The Tibetan Book of the Dead
3 The Poems of Thomas Hardy
4 Classic Fairy Tales
5 Summer Crossing Truman Capote
6 Dr Johnson's Dictionary
7 The Three Musketeers Alexandre Dumas
8 The Aeneid Virgil
9 Candide Voltaire
10 Fortress Besieged Qian Zhongshu
Source: Nielsen BookScan/The Bookseller
