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Viking unveils new logo at 40th anniversary celebrations ahead of bumper year
Viking has celebrated its 40th anniversary with a party and launched a new logo ahead of a bumper year of publishing.
The event took place at 11 Cavendish Square in central London with various agents, authors, editors and individuals from across the trade.
Harriet Bourton, publishing director for fiction, and Daniel Crewe, her counterpart for non-fiction, have shared with The Bookseller how the imprint has developed in the last few years.
“One notable change is that Viking is now run by two people,” Bourton and Crewe said, taking on the roles in 2022 in 2020 respectively. “It’s unusual, but our complementary styles and experiences mean we can guarantee a well-rounded perspective on things.
“We’ve grown in every way since we began, in terms of sales, the scope of the team and our ambitions. In 2020, Viking was a team of nine, this year we’ve become a tight team of 14,” Bourton and Crewe added.
The imprint has recently moved into new subject areas including romance, fantasy, commercial, pop culture and narrative non-fiction as well as representing mammoth sellers such as Richard Osman.
“Every editor here is focused on their core subjects, becoming experts in those areas, with the flexibility to reach towards new markets and audiences when they discover or envision something exceptional,” Crewe and Bourton said.
Fiction editors include editorial director Vikki Moynes, editorial director Rosa Schierenberg across crime, thriller and historical, and publisher Isabel Wall, whose acquisition Brotherless Night by V V Ganeshananthan this year won the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2024).
On non-fiction, Viking is aiming to break the mould with forthcoming titles including Substack sensation Adam Mastroianni’s interactive non-fiction – bought on exclusive before it was a hit at the 2024 London Book Fair.
There have been several new recruits since 2020. “Con Brown [editorial director] has expanded our international reach with his global idea books – led by Bill Gates’ favourite scientist Vaclav Smil – while also signing up the next generation of stellar academics, such as Erin Goeres, whose book on 1066 he pre-empted the day that it came in.
“Shyam Kumar joined us from Orion to take us further into sport, music and comedy, and this autumn he’s publishing Will Buxton’s Grand Prix and a self-generated series of Sherlock Holmes spoofs by megaselling gift-book author Bruno Vincent."
Crewe and Bourton added: “Greg Clowes [commissioning editor] joined us from Vintage [in 2022] to expand our narrative non-fiction – he’s recently published Adam Higginbotham’s Challenger and Cara McGoogan’s The Poison Line to universally stellar reviews, and they all have amazing acquisition announcements up their sleeves.”
Looking ahead, the next year promises to be a major year for Viking in terms of publications. The fiction list set to be “one of our biggest autumns for a decade”, Bourton and Crewe said.
There is a new series from Richard Osman ahead of the film release and tie-in edition next summer, an uplifting Korean novel, The Healing Season of Pottery by Yeon Somin, in keeping with the "Healing Fiction" trend and a debut from Japan early next spring, Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa.
For non-fiction this year there is Will Buxton and Bruno Vincent among others, the paperback of Barack Obama’s A Promised Land in August, and in September, Ben Macintyre’s The Siege, the story of the hostages in the Iranian Embassy which introduced the SAS to the world on live TV.
Next spring there is political neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod’s The Ideological Brain, and Deepa Paul’s Ask Me How It Works, about her polyamorous marriage, “both won in very competitive auctions and representing the scope of the list”, said Bourton and Crewe.
As part of the refreshed identity, a new logo was created to mark Viking’s 40th anniversary and the beginning of a new decade.
Richard Bravery, Viking art director, and Chris Bentham, senior designer, told The Bookseller: “Our rationale when designing this logo was to create something timeless and modern. Eschewing the historical baggage that comes with a word like ’Viking’, we took inspiration from modernist principles of design: clarity of thought, legibility and lack of ornament.
“We’ve carried on the tradition of the Penguin design canon, and former Penguin design masters such as Germano Facetti, Romek Marber and Jan Tschichold, and have created a logo that can represent the whole of our varied and vibrant list. It can be read as an open book; as representing twin strands of fiction and non-fiction; and as forward-facing, while never forgetting the lessons of the past.”
Bravery and Bentham added: “We explored a number of design routes before settling on this, deciding that a monogrammatic ’V’ gave the simple clarity that was needed. Our iconic ‘V’ will adorn every spine on our list, never intruding on the design of our jackets, but proudly displaying our mark of quality, to help realise our vision for the next 40 years of Viking.”
