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Vintage creative director Suzanne Dean has modernised the Vintage Classics ‘red spines’ series 17 years after they were first published, with 10 contemporary classics added to the list.
The new-look Vintage Classics include a mixture of illustration and photography with the crimson red spines retained and a further stripe of red containing the Vintage logo across the front. Highlights include The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, which features a new illustration by Noma Bar, whose original image for the first classic edition became iconic.
The Vintage Classics series was first introduced when Vintage paperbacks launched in 1989, and the iconic red spines originated in 2007 when Dean decided to make the spines bright red.
Dean, creative director of Vintage Design, told The Bookseller of this year’s redesign: “In 2007, choosing the red for the spines was a well considered point. Now, the Vintage logo has become red and that colour, that aspect of our brand identity, comes from the classics.
“It has been quite a while since the first birth of the Vintage Classics—the market has changed, there are more publishers doing their own classics, so it felt right to revitalise the grid.”
The revamped red spines launch today with 20 newly jacketed titles, half of which are new to Vintage Classics and include the first ‘classic’ graphic novel, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, along with current BookTok favourite I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman.
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Other new titles include Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives (pictured), Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Christy Brown’s My Left Foot. Toni Morrison’s works will also be published into red-spine format for the first time.
Nick Skidmore, publishing director at Vintage Classics, told The Bookseller: “If you look at the press coverage around the launch of the red spines in 2007, you can see there was a degree of scepticism. Could it be done? Could a new classics list be launched? I think over the past 17 years, we’ve established a list that is world-class and incredibly well respected. That made the idea of revisiting the red spines a very daunting prospect.”
He added: “The biggest challenge, first of all, was thinking: ‘How do we retain the elements we know are working, that readers really engage with and are loyal to?’ We knew, for example, that the red spine was something readers didn’t want us to move away from.
“The approach was to have a total 360 on the red-spine package, to look at every element and how we could refresh it. The books within the list are monuments of 20th and 21st century literature, so it was a huge, huge task. Back in 2007, one of the things we wanted was to do something different in the classics market, something bold and innovative.
“I feel that this time around, we’ve taken it to the next step. Obviously the consistency of still having Suzanne Dean who came up with the red spines originally has been massively valuable.”
Dean added: “I did read the classics books repeatedly but some of them I could just dip back into during the redesign. I did The Master and Margarita last time, and I’d worked on The Handmaid’s Tale. It was so wonderful using the same illustrator, Noma Bar, to go back to and say: ‘We want you to do another iteration that links to the original but is also different’.”
“Of course, it’s not just me working on all of these titles, it’s a team of designers. It has been a big, joint project for many, many months. While it was important not to abandon all we had achieved in the past 17 years, we wanted the new design to signal a distinct step forward. I think we’ve done it.”