Literary classics return to the bestseller lists

Question: What do Oprah Winfrey, Jane Eyre, Don Quixote, John Steinbeck, Marcel Proust and the Little Mermaid have in common?

Answer: They’re all famous, sure. But these days they’re also players in a hot new retro trend: the classics of literature.

The powerful TV talk-show host got readers’ and publishers’ pulses racing earlier this year when she announced that she would resuscitate her book club with a focus on the tried and true. Steinbeck’s 1952 “East of Eden” was her first choice, and it rode bestseller lists all summer.

French author Proust, along with Spanish character Quixote and the fairy-tale Danish aqua-maiden, belong to one branch of the trend: a spate of high-profile new translations of old works, all the way back to Ovid, that have debuted with great fanfare in recent months. One of them, Edith Grossman’s much-praised take on Cervantes’ “Don Quixote,” is already in its third printing, with nearly 50,000 copies in print since its Nov. 7 publication.

Taken with other events -- notably the May entrance of retail giant Barnes & Noble into publishing classics (“Jane Eyre” among them), along with a repackaging and revitalizing by Penguin and other publishers -- these signs herald a new day for old books.

Baby boomer nostalgia, the rise of book clubs and a longing for ageless wisdom after Sept. 11 are among reasons for the trend cited by publishers, editors and authors. High profit margins for books out of copyright help too.

“We certainly have seen a steady growth in classics sales during the past couple of years, an aggressive growth, in fact,” said David Ebershoff, publishing director of the Modern Library. Modern Library started “a major relaunch” of its paperback classics in 2000 that so far has brought new scholarly introductions and covers to more than 300 books. The new editions, he said, “remind readers, booksellers and the media that there are reasons for going back to these books.” They also give booksellers “a reason to bring the classics from the back of the store to the front.” Modern Library also publishes hardcovers, including recent new translations of works by Dumas, Stendhal, Balzac, Rimbaud and Tolstoy.

Because copyrights have expired, these authors don’t receive royalties, which makes the books more easily profitable. Another reason publishers have turned their attention to classics during the economic downturn, Ebershoff said, is because of their steady sales. Dante’s “Inferno” is a big seller, he says, as are “Moby-Dick,” “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” “The Scarlet Letter,” “Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” “Jane Eyre,” “Middlemarch” and “Sense and Sensibility.” “These are the mega-bestsellers of literature from the long-term view,” said Ebershoff. “Since 9/11, people are looking for the wise voices of civilization, those who have seen times similar to ours and whose work stands up decades later, millennia later.”

The “enormous growth of reading groups,” he added, “brings another level of reader to the classics.” And then there are the baby boomers, says Alan Kahn, president of Barnes & Noble Publishing, which has produced about 60 classics since May and will continue with 50 to 75 each year. “People who grew up in the ‘60s, who are now in their 50s, are looking back and thinking, ‘I should have read this.’ People are picking up more of these titles.”

But the driving force for sales, he adds, is high schools and colleges. So Barnes & Noble has commissioned new introductions, notes, biographical information, discussion questions and even a section on film and other adaptations “inspired by” each work.

With prices from $3.95 to $9.95, sales have been “beyond our wildest expectations,” he said. Bestsellers include Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” and Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” (Borders also publishes a paperback classics line, recently updated, with 30 books in stores now and plans to offer 35 more in 2004.) Mineola, N.Y.-based Dover Publications publishes hundreds of low-cost public-domain classics, including 500 to 600 thrift editions, from a $1 “Beowulf” to a $5 “Moby-Dick.” They’re popular with schools and libraries as well as with the public, said spokeswoman Irene McCoy.

Penguin Classics, the category leader, is doing just fine too, said executive editor Michael Millman. Its 1,300 titles, from ancient to 20th century works, are undergoing a rejuvenation, which began in January. Among the first to undergo a face-lift ($12 for “French flaps” on the covers and thick, rough-cut paper) is a fast-selling 1999 translation of Hermann Hesse’s “Siddhartha.” (Rival Picador, meanwhile, added striking new covers to eight other Hesse works in older translations over the last two years and has seen sales rise 20%, says publisher Frances Coady.)

Penguin was the beneficiary of Oprah Winfrey’s first classics pick, “East of Eden,” which is still in copyright (as is her second, Alan Paton’s “Cry, the Beloved Country,” a Scribner paperback). Winfrey is pondering older selections for future picks, the next to be announced early next year. “East of Eden” sold a staggering 1.5 million copies over the summer, compared with the usual 40,000 a year, which is pretty good too, says Millman. He estimates that Penguin sold at least 100,000 extra copies of other Steinbeck books because of Oprah’s championing.

Although an authoritative text may get a book selected by a professor, a handsome cover is what counts at the bookstore. “By putting a new look on a book, consumers’ eyes are drawn to it,” says Carrie Kania, associate publisher of HarperCollins imprints, including Perennial Classics, which has recently issued new versions of such 20th century classics as “To Kill a Mockingbird” and, soon, Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Factors such as movies affect sales, says LuAnn Walther, editorial director of Everyman’s Library. The spate of Jane Austen films a few years ago led to “a definite rise in sales,” she said.

Ellen Chodosh, vice president and publisher for the trade division of Oxford University Press, including Oxford World’s Classics, in New York, also cited the Austen movies. She hopes Winfrey will generate more attention for all classics, as the BBC’s Big Read has in England, she said.

A renewed interest “in exploring America’s cultural heritage,” which began in the 1970s but has sped up recently, helps explain the growing audience for Library of America, publisher Max Rudin said. Library of America tends to call its works “great American writing” rather than classics, he added, because some people are put off by the term. (Winfrey told TV Guide she calls her selections “great reads from the past.”) That view is shared by Brigitte Weeks, editor in chief of Bookspan, which publishes its own editions for Book-of-the-Month Club and other book clubs it runs. (It has sold 46,000 copies of its “East of Eden” and 15,000 of “Cry, the Beloved Country” since Oprah’s announcements.)

Weeks is just launching a new series called PageTurners. “The promise it makes is that every book in this series is a great read,” she said. The lead title is “Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott. All will include 40 to 60 explanatory pages provided by SparkNotes. The return to classics, she said, is part of a movement in the United States toward hanging on to “the things that are lasting.”

“Americans now seem more interested in history,” said Viking associate publisher Paul Slovak. “And it’s almost as though people are working backward,” from the world wars through the Civil War, the Founding Fathers “and now the classics.” Along the way are some gaps, and New York Review of Books wants to fill them. It has just published its 100th “unknown masterpiece” in a paperback series started in 1999 that features introductions by such of-the-moment authors as Michael Cunningham, Toni Morrison and Jonathan Lethem.

Many had long been out of print, such as Richard Hughes’ 20th century “A High Wind in Jamaica,” said series editor Edwin Frank, but are now selling “in the tens of thousands.” New York Review of Books, like several other publishers, also commissions new translations -- including an upcoming Guy de Maupassant novel by the poet Richard Howard, whose version of Stendhal’s “The Charterhouse of Parma” for Modern Library was a surprise bestseller in 1999, and whose highly anticipated translation of Flaubert’s “A Sentimental Education” is to be issued by Modern Library next year. “Charterhouse” helped prove that new translations can be bestsellers.

But why do readers continuously need new translations when most people wouldn’t dream of altering the originals?

The translators agree that it’s an interesting question.

“The world can always stand a new ‘Don Quixote.’ It’s such a wonderful book,” said Grossman, whose translation is selling well. “You can read ‘Hamlet’ a good number of times and react differently each time.”