New Look Classics

Last year Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath” sold 2 million copies, big business for a book that has been around for a long time. The classics are big business for publishers, and classic editions of those books are getting facelifts. “The classics ain’t what they used to be – in some cases, they’re New and Improved. All this ‘re-branding’ activity, all this new ink and paper, is going on in a corner of the bookstore that is widely seen as deservedly stuck somewhere behind the coffee bins. Who, after all, gets excited about a new edition of Herodotus?”