Cheap classics boom as rest of book trade struggles

As the winds of recession sweep across the UK, a story of the decadent rich in New York has beaten the gloom, with a £1.99 edition of The Great Gatsby selling 232% more than last year.

Elsewhere, publishers are feeling the squeeze, with spending on printed novels down 10%, or £35m, on 2010. But sales in cheap classics are booming, with Wordsworth Editions, which publishes around 200 works of classic fiction for £1.99 apiece, up 10.9% so far this year, with its fiction in particular surging by 18%.

“I think the big reason has to be recessionary,” said Philip Stone, charts editor of the Bookseller. “Publishers of more expensive classics such as Penguin, Oxford University Press and Oneworld haven’t enjoyed that kind of growth from their classics this year.”

Stone pointed to the £1.99 Wordsworth edition of The Great Gatsby, up by 232% year-on-year to 11,550 copies sold, and to the £1.99 Wordsworth edition of Jane Eyre, up by 59.5% year-on-year. Penguin’s £7.99 edition of the F Scott Fitzgerald classic saw sales growth of 15.4% to 3,328 copies in comparison, according to book sales monitor Nielsen BookScan.

Derek Wright, director at Wordsworth, said the publisher’s overall sales have doubled over the last five years to reach £1.3m in the year to end-May 2011, and are on course to be “even better” this year, already at almost £900,000 in the six months since.

“Historically, our classics thrive in recessions. The £1 classic paperback came out in 1992 when the country was in its third year of recession. This was long before I worked for Wordsworth, and I can remember it well, because suddenly there were these big displays in the high-street chains like John Menzies, and I bought them by the dozen,” he said.

“The UK readers’ appetite for the classics does not seem to diminish. The steady stream of TV and film adaptations continues to fuel interest, and I think the psychology behind our current success is exactly the same. When the present-day shopper goes on Amazon to look for, say the book of a new film adaptation like Jane Eyre, our edition will invariably make an early appearance in the listing because of the price, and if you click on it, then another eight or so of our titles pop up in the ‘people who bought this also bought’ section, and at only £1.99, the temptation to pop a couple more in your basket is very strong,” he added.

Stone also put the growth in Wordsworth’s sales down to cash-strapped students looking for cheap editions of their set texts. “Some of the solid sales of the Wordsworth classics will have come from students and parents of students who need to buy copies to study,” he said. “Five years ago, they probably would have walked into a shop and shelled out £7-£10 on a Penguin/OUP/Vintage Classics edition because it looked nice and contained an introduction by an academic that could help with an essay. This year, with their belts tightened, they’ll make do with a much cheaper edition and just use Wikipedia for exam-cram assistance.”

Wright agreed, saying the publisher now sees “a very marked peak in sales at the start of the academic year”.

Wordsworth Editions’ current top 10 bestselling titles in the UK:
1 The Great Gatsby
2 Wuthering Heights
3 Jane Eyre
4 The Secret Garden
5 Great Expectations
6 Frankenstein
7 Pride and Prejudice
8 The Picture of Dorian Gray
9 War and Peace
10 Macbeth