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Introducing Vintage Quarterbound Classics

Introducing Vintage Quarterbound Classics

6 September 2023

min read

Great novels to read, share and keep forever that span decades, these books have captured readers’ imaginations time and time again.

With a cloth quarter binding, contemporary illustration, red silk ribbon and beautiful finishes throughout, these are editions to last a lifetime.

All Quiet on the Western Front by Enrich Maria Remarque (1928)

Illustration © Neil GowerOur knowledge of life is limited to death.

In 1914, a room full of German schoolboys, fresh-faced and idealistic, are goaded by their schoolmaster to troop off to the 'glorious war'.

With the fire and patriotism of youth they sign up. One by one the boys begin to fall...

Rediscover the iconic, moving story of a young 'unknown soldier' experiencing the horror and disillusionment of life in the trenches.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)

Illustration © Jack SmythI want God, I want poetry, I want danger, I want freedom, I want sin.

Welcome to New London. Everybody is happy here.

Our perfect society achieves peace and stability by dispensing with monogamy, privacy, money, family and history itself. Now everyone belongs.

You can be happy too.

All you need to do is take your Soma pills.

Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)

Illustration © Max LoefflerEverything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

Billy Pilgrim - hapless barber's assistant, successful optometrist, alien abductee, senile widower and soldier - has become unstuck in time.

Hiding in the basement of a slaughterhouse in Dresden, with the city and its inhabitants burning above him, he finds himself a survivor of one of the most deadly and destructive battles of the Second World War.

Travel through time and space on the shoulders of Vonnegut himself.

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985)

Illustration © Noma Bar

Better never means better for everyone... It always means worse, for some.

Offred is a Handmaid in The Republic of Gilead, a religious totalitarian state in what was formerly known as the United States. She is placed in the household of The Commander, Fred Waterford - her assigned name, Offred, means 'of Fred'. She has only one function: to breed.

If Offred refuses to enter into sexual servitude to repopulate a devastated world, she will be hanged.

Yet even a repressive state cannot eradicate hope and desire. As she recalls her pre-revolution life in flashbacks, Offred must navigate through the terrifying landscape of torture and persecution in the present day, and between two men upon which her future hangs.

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende (1982)

Illustration © Francisca Álvarez Sánchez

You can't find someone who doesn't want to be found.

As a girl, Clara del Valle can read fortunes, make objects move as if they had lives of their own, and predict the future.

Following the mysterious death of her sister, Rosa the Beautiful, Clara is mute for nine years. When she breaks her silence, it is to announce that she will be married soon to the stern and volatile landowner Esteban Trueba.

Set in an unnamed Latin American country over three generations, The House of the Spirits is a magnificent epic reminiscent of the writing of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa (1958)

Illustration © Hans Tisdall

A house of which one knew every room wasn't worth living in.

It is the spring of 1869 and there is talk of revolution in Sicily.

Fabrizio, the charismatic Prince of Salina, still rules over thousands of acres and hundreds of people, including his own numerous family, in mingled splendour and squalor.

But then comes Garibaldi's landing on the Scicilian coast.

As Garibaldi's forces press inland, the Prince must decide whether to resist the forces of change or come to terms with them.

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (2011)

Illustration © Refael Idan Suissa

The finest of pleasures are always the unexpected ones.

The circus arrives without warning.

It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Against the grey sky the towering tents are striped black and white. A sign hanging upon an iron gates reads:

Opens at Nightfall
Closes at Dawn

Celia and Marco are two young magicians in the Circus, who have been trained since childhood for a deadly duel. With the lives of everyone at the Circus of Dreams at stake, they must test the very limits of the imagination, and of their love.

The Sailor who Fall from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima (1963)

Illustration © Seb Agresti

Living is merely the chaos of existence.

A band of savage thirteen-year-old boys reject the adult world as illusory, hypocritical, and sentimental, and train themselves in a brutal callousness they call 'objectivity'.

When the mother of one of them begins an affair with a ship's officer, he and his friends idealise the man at first; but it is not long before they conclude that he is in fact soft and romantic. They regard this disillusionment as an act of betrayal on his part - and the retribution is deliberate and horrifying.

Quarterbound Classics

Shop nine collectable editions over on the Penguin Shop.

Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)

Illustration © Sophy Hollington

Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.

Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a spellbinding and dazzlingly innovative portrait of a woman haunted by the past.

Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh (1993)

Illustration © Vintage Design

We start off with high hopes, then we bottle it.

Trainspotting defined a generation and changed the face of British fiction. Published in 1993, Irvine Welsh's debut novel burst on to the literary scene in all its dark, raw and exhilarating glory.

Its cast of characters, including Renton, Spud, Sick Boy and Begbie, grapple with the meaning of life and heroin addiction in Edinburgh at the end of the 1980s – all told in a dazzling, funny and inventive vernacular style.

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (1948)

Illustration © Aino-Maija Metsola

Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression.

I Capture the Castle tells the story of seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain, who lives with her bohemian family in a crumbling castle in the middle of nowhere. All their lives will soon be transformed by the arrival of new neighbours from America, and Cassandra finds herself falling in love.

Funny as hell, charismatic, deliciously eccentric, Austenesque and utterly charming, I Capture the Castle is an enchanting novel about growing up.

Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)

To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.

Born at the stroke of midnight, at the precise moment of India's independence, Saleem Sinai is destined from birth to be special. For he is one of 1,001 children born in the midnight hour, children who all have special gifts, children with whom Saleem is telepathically linked. But there has been a terrible mix up at birth, and Saleem's life takes some unexpected twists and turns.

At once a fascinating family saga and an astonishing evocation of a vast land and its people, Midnight’s Children stands apart as a brilliant work of fiction.

If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino (1979)

What harbour can receive you more securely than a great library?

You go into a bookshop and buy If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. You like it. But alas there is a printer's error in your copy. You take it back to the shop and get a replacement. But the replacement seems to be a totally different story. You try to track down the original book you were reading but end up with a different narrative again.

This remarkable novel leads you through many different books including a detective adventure, a romance, a satire, an erotic story, a diary and a quest. But the real hero is you, the reader.

Stoner by John Williams (1965)

For a few moments in the evening, then, they talked quietly and casually, as if they were old friends or exhausted enemies.

The eponymous William Stoner is born at the end of the 19th century, and although initially sent to the university to study agronomy he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life.

John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero.

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter (1979)

There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer.

Angela Carter was a storytelling sorceress, the literary godmother of Neil Gaiman, David Mitchell, Audrey Niffenegger, J. K. Rowling, Kelly Link, and other contemporary masters of supernatural fiction.

In her must-read masterpiece, The Bloody Chamber she spins subversively dark and sensual versions of familiar fairy tales and legends giving them exhilarating new life in a style steeped in the romantic trappings of the gothic tradition.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)

He was going to live forever, or die in the attempt.

Set in the closing months of World War II, this is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. His real problem is not the enemy - it is his own army — if Yossarian makes any attempts to excuse himself from the perilous missions then he is caught in Catch-22.

When a book title becomes a phrase in everyday life, it's a good sign you should read that book. Darkly hilarious and absurdly enjoyable, Catch-22 is a rite of passage to be read by all.

The Woman in Black by Susan Hill (1983)

For I see that then I was still all in a state of innocence, but that innocence, once lost, is lost forever.

Arthur Kipps, a junior solicitor, is summoned to attend a funeral of the sole inhabitant of Eel Marsh House. The house stands wreathed in fog and mystery, but it is not until he glimpses a wasted young woman, dressed all in black, at the funeral, that a creeping sense of unease begins to take hold...

The Woman in Black is gothic horror at its finest, a truly terrifying classic English ghost story that will give you goosebumps.

Introducing Vintage Quarterbound Classics

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