Friday, 25 February 2011

Orange Inheritances

The Orange Prize for Fiction is one of the UK's major literary prizes, going to what is judged to be the best work of fiction by a female writer. Not being from the UK myself, I hadn't realised that Orange was a telephone company, rather than just a pleasantly citric name for a prize. I only worked this out when I came across the covers to Vintage Classics' six upcoming 'Orange Inheritance' books.

What they've done is to get 6 Orange winners from various times in the last 15 years to each choose a book to be published as a Vintage Classic, with a new intro from said Orange-winner. Here are the covers. I have two observations to make: the first is that all of these would be much better without the phone company logo on them (though several of them are very nice). The second is that isn't it uncannily lucky that five of the six writers just happened to choose books which were already published by Vintage Classics (and in the sixth case, chose a book in the public domain)?








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12 comments:

  1. CorpusLibris26 February 2011 at 11:17

    Notice how only one of them chose a female writer? Curious, that.

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  2. JRSM26 February 2011 at 16:44

    Hey, that's a very good point. I hadn't noticed!

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  3. Stuart Bache27 February 2011 at 10:48

    It's difficult to see passed the Orange branding, which, although small, is bold in it's reluctance to move from two overly measured and rigidly spaced areas.

    Notice on 'So Long, See You Tomorrow', it looks a tad awkward overlapping.

    Shame, as these are nice illustrations and just having the colour orange (with perhaps a spine logo) would have been enough.

    I very much doubt the Art Dept enjoyed the strict guidelines.

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  4. JRSM27 February 2011 at 13:33

    Stuart, I suspect you're right--the little logo just grabs the eye and spoils the images.

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  5. Stuart Bache27 February 2011 at 15:41

    They're still lovely though :)

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  6. Alfie Gallagher28 February 2011 at 01:15

    Although the illustrated work is generally great, the tie-in to corporate sponsorship and branding make me slightly queasy.

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  7. Mae1 March 2011 at 05:20

    Oh they're so lovely. I would have bought them. I thought you were kidding when you said the Orange logo was on the covers...until I saw them. Gah!

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  8. CBlack1 March 2011 at 12:15

    I'm not sure if by Vintage Classics you mean a large parent company, but Life and Fate is published by NYRB Classics. Does Vintage own that? I assume either Tess or Eugenie Grandet is the public domain one, right?

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  9. JRSM1 March 2011 at 13:32

    CBlack, sorry, I wasn't very clear. NYRB publishes Life and Fate in the US, while Vintage/Random House publishes it in the UK. Tess and Eugenie are both public domain, but Tess was already a Vintage Classic, so the Balzac is the only book that wasn't already available as a VC.

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  10. CBlack2 March 2011 at 11:07

    Ah, I see. Thanks for clarifying that. I love your blog, by the way. Books + graphic art--two of my favorite things together.

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  11. John Self7 March 2011 at 04:56

    Just to clarify, the introducers were of course asked to choose a book which was either public domain or published by Random House UK. That still leaves a pretty wide choice.

    And the covers are completely lovely and are entirely ruined by the Orange branding.

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  12. JRSM7 March 2011 at 13:32

    Thanks for that, John--those restrictions were not mentioned on the promo website, but it does make sense.

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