Vintage Books

Vintage began in 1954 as a practical idea from Alfred A. Knopf: give the authors on his hardcover list a paperback home. Random House bought the imprint in April 1960. A British division followed in 1990, and when Random House later merged with Bantam Doubleday Dell, Doubleday's Anchor Books paperback line was folded into the same division. Today Vintage sits inside Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, part of Penguin Random House, which is owned by Bertelsmann. Publishers Weekly reported that Anchor was being phased out, with its paperback backlist moving over to Vintage.

The list has always been wide. Vintage Contemporaries, launched in September 1984 by editor Gary Fisketjon, mixed reprints and originals, almost all by American authors. Its titles included Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City and, later, Donna Tartt's The Secret History. Vintage Crime/Black Lizard took shape in 1990, when Random House acquired the small press Black Lizard and its Jim Thompson reissues, and joined the Hammett, Cain and Chandler titles Vintage already carried. There is also Vintage Classics and a digital short-story line, Vintage Shorts.

Names on the backlist include William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, Albert Camus, Ralph Ellison, William Styron and A.S. Byatt, along with Toni Morrison's Beloved and Song of Solomon. Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, with Ralph Steadman's drawings, is a Vintage paperback too. The 1998 edition runs 224 pages. Thompson, a national-affairs correspondent for Rolling Stone, is the sort of writer the imprint keeps in print for the long haul.

For a reader, Vintage mostly means affordable paperbacks of books that have already proved themselves: twentieth-century landmarks, prizewinning novels, crime fiction, journalism and essays. Expect reissues and backlist more often than debuts, though the imprint has published original work as well. If a Vintage book hooked you, browsing the imprint's other titles by the same author is a sensible next step. So is following the crime or classics lines into neighbouring territory.