Vintage mines backlist to launch new 'big ideas' Minis series

Vintage is launching a new series, Vintage Minis, designed to celebrate the publisher’s extensive backlist by turning snippets from great contemporary and classic writers into small but compelling titles on "big" subjects, such as death, eating and love. 

Pitched as “low on price but big on content”, the new range of short books will launch with 20 titles in June 2017, priced £3.50 each.

The A-format Vintage Minis take selections from fiction, non-fiction and essays to create a "complete reading experience" in approximately 100 pages. The concept behind the series is to provide "essential reading" from some of the world’s greatest writers on "the experiences that make us human”.

Authors whose work will feature in the new series include Haruki Murakami, on the topic of desire, Joseph Heller on Work; Nigella Lawson on eating; Jeanette Winterson on love; Marcel Proust on jealousy; Karl Ove Knausgaard on fatherhood and Julian Barnes on death. Other titles in the series include Homeland from Salman Rushdie and Psychedelics from Aldous Huxley. 

Charlotte Knight, editor at Vintage, curated the series, with the help of colleagues Frances Macmillan, Victoria Murray-Brown and Nick Skidmore, as a way of mining the richness of the Vintage backlist. The Minis series follows on from the publication of Vintage "shorts" such as the Feminism series published in March 2015.

Vintage has a dedicated editorial team to focus on backlist and classics and has a campaigns manager dedicated just to its backlist. 

The Vintage design team collaborated on the series look, with different designers responsible for different covers.

Rachel Cugnoni, publishing director for Vintage, said: "Big ideas, little books. The Minis are capsules of compressed wisdom. We publish some of the world’s best writers and bring them to readers in long form. However time is short and so we have selected extracts from our writers’ works that through this series will cover most of the important subjects encountered in a life. It is the publisher’s job to explore format and presentation. In this case small really IS beautiful."

Suzanne Dean, creative director at Vintage, said: "With design being at the heart of Vintage, this beautiful minimalist series demanded a concise, immediate visual response. A small, vibrant series packing a powerful message.”