VINTAGE WOOLF
Born on this day in 1882, Virginia Woolf is one of the best loved and most admired writers of the twentieth century.
We are excited to share our latest Vintage Woolf Classics, including some previously unseen covers.
HOW SHOULD A PERSON BE?
Limited Edition Posters
To celebrate the release of Sheila Heti’s brilliant literary novel, How Should a Person Be?, we have these limited edition posters to download. Simply click on an image and save to your desktop to use how you wish.
Each poster was presented as a possible cover, and were designed in-house and by the talented illustrator Rachel Lillie. Experimenting with different mediums and color combinations to maintain a painterly and handmade quality.
To read more about the finished cover see our previous post here.
MOD - Richard Weight
Strip away the jacket – featuring photography from Dean Chalkley’s wonderful project ’The New Faces’ – to reveal the flash of colour you get from the lining of a sharp suit.
Richard Weight’s MOD is the story of one of the biggest and brassiest youth movements and of it’s legacy.
It’s a book for anyone who is, or ever has been, young and British.
VINTAGE LIMITED EDITION HARDBACKS
Vintage design has the privilege of working on many limited edition hardbacks, working both in-house and collaboratively with illustrators. Here are just a small selection of covers including cloth-bound editions of Tolstoy and the fiftieth anniversary edition of Catch-22 with sprayed edges.
Tord Boontje designed the Harvill centenary edition of Doctor Zhivago and the Vintage Classics edition of Madame Bovary was illustrated by Karen Nicol.
Also featured are the upcoming Vintage Classics editions of The Enchanted Wanderer by Nikolai Leskov, illustrated by Klaus Haapaniemi; and Kurt Vonnegut: Letters, both published in April this year.
THE SORROW OF WAR
Based on true experiences of Bao Ninh and banned by the communist party, this novel is revered as the ’All Quiet on the Western Front for our era’.
Our latest cover takes 1960s Vietnam posters as inspiration, helping to portray the isolation felt by Kien whose job is to search the Jungle of Screaming Souls for corpses. The book is his attempt to understand the eleven years of his life he gave to a senseless war.
VINTAGE FLEMING
In April 2013, Vintage Classics will publish new editions of Ian Fleming’s only two works of non-fiction: The Diamond Smugglers and Thrilling Cities.
From celebrities, gangsters and geishas to the world’s greatest smuggling racket, Fleming’s experiences whilst researching these books provided the backdrop to many of his famous James Bond novels. It therefore seemed fitting for the covers to tie in with our Vintage 007 series, published earlier this year.
WIGGO POSTERS
You can download your Wiggo posters now in celebration of Bradley’s fantastic year, which was crowned last night by winning BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year.
CURIOSITY - Philip Ball
Science laboratory bottles beautifully lit and containing one of the most wondrous transformations in nature: the tadpole to the frog. Susan Derges’ poetic visions of science and nature are the perfect accompaniment and cover for Philip Ball’s book on the rise of curiosity and the evolution of modern science.
The book will be published in May 2013 in Vintage paperback.
An exhibition of the work of Susan Derges is currently on show at the Purdy Hicks Gallery in London.
THE TALE OF RAW HEAD AND BLOODY BONES - Book Launch
The book launch for Jack Wolf’s latest novel was held on the 5th December in the deeply evocative and atmospheric Old Operating Theatre Museum in London. It was a fantastic evening with the author reading from his book in the operating theatre which added an appropriate frisson to his chilling description of a dissection.
The Bookshop Band performed their haunting song Leonora and Bloody Bones which was written specially for the event, and they continued to entertain throughout the evening.
You can read more about the cover design in one of our previous posts here.
DICKENS AT CHRISTMAS
This Hardback edition gathers together not only Dickens' Christmas Books but also stories that Dickens wrote for the special seasonal editions of his periodicals All the Year Round and Household Words, and a festive tale from The Pickwick Papers.
For the jacket, illustrator Emily Sutton created a festive Victorian shop-front, taking inspiration from Eric Ravilious' High Street. The book is also beautifully illustrated throughout.
Available now from Vintage Classics.
BLACK WHITE & COLOUR
The perfect stocking filler. A creative sketch and doodle book from the Vintage Design team.
Quirky and cheeky, fine art or naive, whatever your style, there is inspiration here for all - artists, painters, designers and idle doodlers alike.
Available to buy now in time for Christmas here.
ULVERTON
In December the Vintage Classics reissue of Ulverton marks the 20th anniversary of its first publication. At the heart of Adam Thorpe’s novel lies the fictional village of Ulverton, whose story over three hundred years is told by many different voices.
We chose woodcut illustrator, Jonathan Gibbs to give the cover a traditional feel but with modern twists, which help show the historic sweep of the novel.
Jonathan Gibbs is represented by The Central Illustration Agency.
THE GARDENER OF OCHAKOV - Andrey Kurkov
The Gardener of Ochakov is about Igor, a young man who puts on an old soviet policeman’s uniform and finds himself transported back to 1957 – an era that is far less idyllic than his mother’s generation had always made out. In fact it’s positively dangerous. It is the latest novel by Andrey Kurkov, the Ukrainian author whose books are full of black-humour and often wander into the surreal.
Kurkov’s wit finds a brilliant visual partner for his novels in Pablo Amargo, the award-wining Spanish illustrator.
“In my illustrations for Kurkov´s covers I look to create pieces full of mystery and playfulness” - www.pabloamargo.com
Published 1st August 2013.

HHhH - Laurent Binet
All the characters in HHhH are real. All the events depicted are true. But alongside the nerve-shredding preparations for the attack runs another story: when you are a novelist writing about real people, how do you resist the temptation to make things up?
For the cover Third Reich era typography was used for the title, hiding the blurred face of the ‘Blond Beast’. The book also features special screen printed edges.
HHhH has been nominated as one of Waterstones Books of the Year.
