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The classics cut

05.04.07 Liz Bury

It all started with a light-hearted  game of Orion staff challenging one another to confess to which of the classics of English literature they had never read. For Malcolm Edwards, Orion Group publisher and deputy c.e.o., the embarrassing omission was Middlemarch by George Eliot; for one of his colleagues (he is too kind to name and shame publicly) it was Vanity Fair. What was more, "we realised that because the books were so long we never were going to read them," Edwards says.

That got Orion's creative minds thinking that there must be other people out there who felt the same way. "Literally, life is too short. Once you get to a certain place in your life, you realise that there is a finite number of books you're going to be able to read," Edwards says. He admits to "bouncing off" Moby Dick several times, even though the whaling, the quest and the biblical aspects of the book all sound appealing. Would he have had more success with a shorter, snappier version?

Precision cutters

With this germ of an idea now planted in the Orion mind, market research among heavy book buyers was commissioned to find out what people really thought about the classics. The results were "shocking", Edwards says. "The way they viewed the classic novel was as books that had been rammed down their throats at school and when they left, they gave them up—like algebra or chemistry." The near-unanimous results showed that the classics were viewed as long, slow and repetitive. But there was a glimmer of hope: many respondents admitted to having an interest in the stories  when they had come upon them in another way, like watching a TV adaptation or film that brought alive the story and characters. The sales spike that follows adaptations was enough to persuade Orion that a slimmed-down version of the classics might be worth a try.

"We wondered if we could edit the books down in a way that would be more palatable to contemporary readers, in the same way that Shakespeare is routinely edited for performance these days," Edwards says. "Hamlet and Richard III are both four-hour-plus plays as Shakespeare wrote them." The new Compact Editions series launches in May with six titles, with another six following in September, each of which has been "sympathetically edited" by between 30% and 40% to fit an extent of roughly 400 pages. First out are Anna Karenina, Vanity Fair, David Copperfield, The Mill on the Floss, Moby Dick and Wives and Daughters. All in B-format paperback at £6.99, they have a mid-market, aspirational look and all carry the strapline "in half the time".

Orion approached the editing with extreme care, "perhaps more than might have been strictly required, commercially-speaking", Edwards says. By enlisting the help of expert abridgers and academic experts on the books, the text has been trimmed down as much as was possible without detracting from the story, the characters or the broad nature of the novel. None of the text has been rewritten. "We are trying very hard to be faithful to the spirit of the books." The list is balanced to include a mix of male and female authors and different kinds of story, and the idea is to have a range of stories in each new set of publications.

What's the point?

At least one bookseller, however, is convinced that shortening the classics in this way amounts to a destructive dumbing down. "I just don't think it is possible to edit the classics without destroying what is interesting and important about them," writes Matthew Crockatt of London independent Crockatt & Powell on his blog, www/crockattandpowell.blogspot.com. "Editing the classics is a bit like watching football highlights. It might be more entertaining in a 'goals per second' way but to think it is in any way close to the real experience is pure delusion. Those who read the edited classics are missing the point." Edwards "doesn't buy" the view that classic novels are untouchable.

He says: "With novels, there is a reaction that it's sacrilegious to think of touching them. They're not religious icons and they're not museum pieces, but they're in danger of becoming museum pieces." His counter-argument runs that authors such as Dickens and Thackeray were writing an agreed number of words per week to contract and therefore "digress furiously" at times; while people who love Dickens and Thackeray love the digressions, these new, shortened editions are aimed at people who would never consider buying and reading an 800-page novel.

Readable and approachable

A rival classics publisher is also among those who fail to see a market for the slimline classics: "Why are they necessary? It's patronising to consumers. One of the striking things about a huge number of the classics is how readable and approachable they are. Just making them shorter doesn't make them more palatable." In its rival's eyes, Orion is guilty of "a slight case of dumbing down. It is not a very progressive move." The publisher believes readers can be trusted to self-abridge by skimming passages that are not crucial to character or plot development. "Aren't readers intelligent enough to do that?"

Critics of the project also suggest that those who are willing and able to read the classics want to read the whole thing. "If you can get through 400 pages, you can get through 800 or 900," says one observer. While the rival classics publisher thinks that "for people who want to have read them, but don't have time, they [Compact Editions] will not make them feel they've done the job."

Orion's aim with this series is not to engage those who "continue to enjoy Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, Tolstoy or whoever in the current editions", Edwards replies. "It's an attempt to reach people who would never otherwise have tried them because they're put off by the size of the books and the aura that surrounds them. What we're trying to do is open these books out to new readers."

Shorter is sweeter

Luckily for Orion, some booksellers are much more enthusiastic about the idea than Crockatt & Powell. Louise Weir, director and co-founder of www.lovereading.co.uk, the online book club and transactional book sales website, describes Compact Editions as "a breath of fresh air". "The package is absolutely brilliant. We feel that our members are going to thoroughly enjoy them."

Lovereading will be vigorously promoting the books in May as its Series of the Month, starting with an email to all its members to explain the concept behind the list; and there will be a feature on the website with extracts from the originals and the shortened versions, to show the difference between the two. "It will generally be the opening chapter or two, enough to whet the appetite," Weir says. Each title will also have its own web-page, with comments from Malcolm Edwards. He says: "The hope is that there will never be a sense that anything is missing, if we've done our job properly."

Weir does not think the Compact Editions represent a dumbing down. "Personally, I am guilty of never having read Anna Karenina, because it's just so long. I do get turned off by a thick book," she says. "I'd much rather read two 300-page books than one 600-page book!" In addition to promoting the first six titles, Lovereading will also be pre-promoting the September six from May. They are: Bleak House, Middlemarch, Jane Eyre, The Count of Monte Cristo, North and South and The Portrait of a Lady. Waterstone's is also giving the first six titles a whirl.

Simon Robertson, the chain's fiction buyer for classics, says: "It's an interesting idea and we are trialling Vanity Fair in our three-for-two and giving the others a high core rating, to see how customers react to them." Edwards is happy with that. He says Orion's "broad target is this year to establish the series as viable, in which case it can be extended at length. If we get to the point where we are reprinting some or all of these books then we'll feel we're on a right track. We expect them to be stocked in the classics section. Ideally we'd have a big shelf in Tesco or Asda, but I'm not necessarily expecting that on day one."

Flagship Feature Liz Bury classics Orion

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