This week
Classics with style
THE Oxford World's Classics - originally mini hardbacks that sold for a shilling - have been rebranded once again by Oxford University Press. Now in paperback, with 700 titles, they have new covers and new editions.
Editors at the Great Clarendon Street headquarters say they are delighted with the "fresh, contemporary feel" the new cover designs have given their collection.
Last month saw a new edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte, edited by Herbert Rosengarten and Josephine McDonagh, and a revised edition of Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo, edited by David Coward.
Highlights later in the year include a new edition of Darwin's The Origin of the Species and Evolutionary Writings.
Also look out for new titles launched by London-based Capuchin Classics, which is offering readers a range of reprints of outstanding works, which have undeservedly been forgotten, or are not easily available.
Capuchin plans to publish 16 to 20 titles a year, and I was impressed by my handsome paperback edition of Tom Stacey's The Man Who Knew Everything, with a new foreword by Sir Peregrine Worsthorne.
Other titles out this summer include Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling and An Error of Judgement by Pamela Hansford Johnson.
I thoroughly enjoyed Stacey's yarn about Granville Jones, one of the greats of old-time Fleet Street, now self-exiled on an island Emirate in the Gulf.
The story was first published as Deadline in 1988 by William Heinemann, and then adapted for a film of the same name starring John Hurt, which the author did not approve of.
I'm glad Stacey's story has been rescued from the archives, and look forward to more forgotten gems from Capuchin.
12:03pm Thursday 8th May 2008
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