Vintage Classics is a paperback publisher of contemporary fiction and non-fiction. It is part of the Vintage imprint, which is itself a part of Random House

Random House

Random House, Inc. is the largest general-interest trade book publisher in the world. It has been owned since 1998 by the German private media corporation Bertelsmann and has become the umbrella brand for Bertelsmann book publishing. Random House also has a movie production arm, Random House Films,...

 Publishers. The famous American publisher Alfred A. Knopf

Alfred A. Knopf (person)

Alfred Abraham Knopf, Sr. was a leading American publisher of the 20th century, and founder of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.. His contemporaries included the likes of Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer, and Frank Nelson Doubleday, J. Henry Harper and Henry Holt...

 (1892–1984) originally founded Vintage Books in the United States in 1954 as a paperback home for the authors published by his company. Vintage was launched in the United Kingdom in 1990 and works independently from the American imprint although both are part of the international publishing group, Random House. Vintage in the UK is run by a small team of people working in the Random House offices in Pimlico

Pimlico

Pimlico is a small area of central London in the City of Westminster. Like Belgravia, to which it was built as a southern extension, Pimlico is known for its grand garden squares and impressive Regency architecture....

 in London.

Vintage is now a paperback publisher of contemporary fiction and non-fiction, publishing writers like Philip Roth

Philip Roth

Philip Milton Roth is an American novelist. He gained fame with the 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus, an irreverent and humorous portrait of Jewish-American life that earned him a National Book Award...

, Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan

Ian Russell McEwan CBE, FRSA, FRSL is a British novelist and screenwriter, and one of Britain's most highly regarded writers. In 2008, The Times named him among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945"....

, Richard Yates

Richard Yates (novelist)

Richard Yates was an American novelist and short story writer, known for his exploration of mid-20th century life.-Life:...

, Willa Cather, Martin Amis

Martin Amis

Martin Louis Amis is a British novelist, the author of many novels including Money and London Fields . He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester, but will step down at the end of the 2010/11 academic year...

 and Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison is a Nobel Prize and Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, editor, and professor. Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed characters. Among her best known novels are The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Beloved...

. There are many Booker and Nobel Prize-winning authors on the Vintage list, including writers such as Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch

Dame Iris Murdoch DBE was an Irish-born British author and philosopher, best known for her novels about political and social questions of good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious...

, who won the Booker Prize for her novel, The Sea, the Sea

The Sea, the Sea

The Sea, the Sea is the 19th novel by Iris Murdoch. It won the Booker Prize in 1978.-Plot summary:The Sea, the Sea is a tale of the strange obsessions that haunt a self-satisfied playwright and director as he begins to write his memoirs...

, and also has been longlisted in the category of The Lost Man Booker for her novel, A Fairly Honourable Defeat

A Fairly Honourable Defeat

A Fairly Honourable Defeat is a novel by the British writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch.-Plot summary:The lives of several friends are thrown into disarray by the machinations of Julius King...

, or Salman Rushdie who won the Booker of all Bookers for Midnight's Children

Midnight's Children

Midnight's Children is a 1981 book by Salman Rushdie about India's transition from British colonialism to independence and the partition of India. It is considered an example of postcolonial literature and magical realism...

. The imprint also publishes a huge variety of books while Vintage Classics publishes the great authors of the past.

Vintage Classics has existed since the inception of Vintage and publishes Graham Greene

Graham Greene

Henry Graham Greene, OM, CH was an English author, playwright and literary critic. His works explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world...

, Harper Lee

Harper Lee

Nelle Harper Lee is an American author known for her 1960 Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird, which deals with the issues of racism that were observed by the author as a child in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama...

, Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...

 and Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf

Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....

, among others. In August 2007 they will have a major re-launch of the list, the most high-profile or perhaps controversial aspect of which is the idea of 'twinning' modern authors with established classic ones to provide new ways of thinking about the books, such as pairing Ian McEwan's Atonement with Henry James's What Maisie Knew and Dante's Inferno with Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater.

Jacket Design in Existing and New Classics

Vintage Classics have also moved away from the traditional idea used by other classics publishers such as Penguin

Penguin Books

Penguin Books is a publisher founded in 1935 by Sir Allen Lane and V.K. Krishna Menon. Penguin revolutionised publishing in the 1930s through its high quality, inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths and other high street stores for sixpence. Penguin's success demonstrated that large...

 or Oxford University Press

Oxford University Press

Oxford University Press is the largest university press in the world. It is a department of the University of Oxford and is governed by a group of 15 academics appointed by the Vice-Chancellor known as the Delegates of the Press. They are headed by the Secretary to the Delegates, who serves as...

 of jacketing classics with art from the period in which they were written. Instead, Vintage uses contemporary covers to broaden the book's appeal and to give the entire Vintage catalog a single stylistic signature.

External links

• The Vintage Classics website
• The Vintage Books website
• http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/03/what_makes_a_modern_classic.htmlA debate from The Guardian
  The Guardian
  The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
  
  Blog on what makes a book a classic]
• Giles Foden discusses the Vintage Classics twinning concept and invites comment