Classic” used to be a much-debated term. Nowadays, it seems, it can be applied to anything that’s really good. The word still connotes longevity, though, and is used in that way by Picador, which celebrates 30 years of quality publishing with uniform-edition reissues of some of its greatest hits. The set includes Colm TóibÃn’s The Heather Blazing [Buy online], Michael Herr’s Despatches [Buy online], Graham Swift’s Waterland [Buy online], Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot [Buy online] and PJ O’Rourke’s Holidays in Hell [Buy online]. They haven’t all been reset, so Brett Eason Ellis’s American Psycho [Buy online], for instance, is better read in the old, bigger format. But on the whole these are lovely, neat books — the covers are demure black-and-white photographs, giving them the “classic” look as pioneered by Penguin’s Modern Classics and 20th Century Classics.
Meanwhile, Penguin has gone the other way, repackaging classic 19th-century novels with very contemporary covers. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights [Buy online], for instance, looks like it just came whizzing in from the world of The Blair Witch Project.
Flamingo selects a book from each year of the 1960s for its Sixties set, and gives them stylish neo-retro designs. The series includes Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer [Buy online], Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur, Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman [Buy online], JG Ballard’s The Drought [Buy online], Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem [Buy online] and Henri Charrière’s Papillon [Buy online].