Welcome back to Book Break. In today's episode, we're investigating what makes a classic.
So today I'm going behind the scenes with Macmillan Collector's Library, which publish
gorgeous editions of classics from Little Women to the Sonnets by William Shakespeare.
These books are very popular on Instagram, because they just do look so gorgeous, so
can you talk me through the process of how you choose the covers and everything.
We work with our art director and a picture researcher, who has the rather lovely job
of finding images for us. And she will go to picture libraries, art dealers, maybe younger
new artists, and we will look at a number of possibilities for each book.
So this is a Christmas book coming up. This one I thought was a bit too fussy, this is
quite a modern image, these are traditional Christmas stories. And again I thought this
was a bit stark. So we all agreed in the end to pick this one, which is cute and gifty.
There's never any harm in having a cat on the front cover.
And then, what can be a little bit harder sometimes is these sort of 18th/19th century
novels. So this is a fantastic book, The Awakening. Which is an American novella about a woman
who challenges the social norms. How do you capture that in an image?
So here we've gone for the sort of traditional oil painting look. They're not vastly dissimilar,
we've just picked the image that we think reflects the story, and that will stand out
best on the cover.
So you can see even here, there are different moods. This is probably a bit too cutesy for
The Turn of the Screw.
It's a frightening story.
This one is just a girl. I don't think - I mean she looks like something bad has happened
to her - but it doesn't necessarily tell a story.
Whereas we went for this image because it has the two children.
It suggests a relationship between them.
And the wistfulness of this child's gaze into the middle distance suggests something's happened.
So I think that's quite a good example of an image that captures what's in the book.
How do you choose which books you're going to publish?
I think it has to have bite.
It has to have endured, and stood the test of time.
What they will all have in common is that they will deal with themes that are still
relevant today. Universal themes.
So the parts of our human nature that have always existed.
Exactly, exactly.
And is there anything that you do have to change about the books?
For Collector's Library, one of our selling points is that - I would say with the exception
of about two or three books - they are complete and unabridged.
So we are trying to be as close to the original editions as possible.
So we'll either publish, or we won't publish. If something is too long, or too dated.
I have however just thought of one exception.
We're going to be publishing Doctor Doolittle.
Dr Doolittle is a wonderful story of a man who talks to animals. It's quite relevant
today because it's very much about preserving nature and preserving the environment.
It reads very nicely, and then it suddenly comes to what is now, by today's standards,
a very racist storyline.
So in fact, this is the one book that we have changed.
So we've asked the lovely Philip Ardagh. He's literally just rewritten one chapter.
So what kind of books have you decided not to publish?
Quite a few. There's a series of detective stories with a central character Raffles.
People of my generation will remember. It was a very big television series. Very very
popular.
So we thought, oh those would be fun to do.
If you read them now, to me they fell very flat.
There's a very sort of classist structure of the, you know, public school fellow with
his rather inferior sidekick.
And then other things we've turned down because, as I've mentioned there was issues with race
in Dr Doolittle which we've overcome. Some, you just can't do.
An interesting one was She by Rider Haggard. Which is a great story, women ruling, women
in charge. But it's set in Africa and it's really - I don't think you can publish it
now.
Right, yeah you have to make those decisions.
Yeah.
And what do you think people can get out of reading classics that's different from new
books?
I think you get back to the source in a way. You'll probably be able to find a book in
any classics list that has inspired what you might be reading. Your contemporary reading
now.
It's kind of getting back to those original tellings.
Or just something that's something really magnificent, you know.
Wuthering Heights. There's nothing else like Wuthering Heights. It's quite a unique book.
Quite shocking in its day, and actually still in a way quite shocking now.
I think what's also been interesting is to revisit books, and there's some times it's
fantastic to come back to these books, and appreciate them in different ways. Sometimes
you revisit a book and think - mmm.
It's not what you remembered.
It's not what you remembered! I mentioned Wuthering Heights earlier, which I recently
reread. And I had issues with it now.
Sometimes books come into your life at exactly the right time.
Exactly.
Even if you don't like it so much later in life, it was still perfect at that time.
It was perfect at that time, and I think a lot of books like Wuthering Heights have kind
of been gateway books.
They're books that introduce you to the magic of books, and that's one of them. That really
grabs you.
And what books now, that are being published now, do you think might become classics one
day?
Mm, that's a very good question. I think it's very hard to say. It's got to be a test of
time.
I think Bridget Jones is a classic. In terms of capturing both the era and the sort of
anxiety of early adulthood. Maybe that will be a classic.
It's those universal emotions.
Exactly.
They're not going to go away.
Exactly, and then- what do you think might be a classic?
Oh I don't know. I think about it a lot and it's a really hard question.
It is a hard question!
Sometimes you read those books where they just seem - you relate to them so so much.
Exactly.
And I think those kinds of books-
-might endure-
-might stick around.
Well thank you so much for talking to me, it's been really interesting! And do give
this video a thumbs up if you love these books as much as I do.
And do subscribe to Book Break for new videos every Thursday. See you next time!