“Paperback revolution” has become a cliché both in and out of the book business without any clear understanding on the part of most people who use it that this “revolution” has been going on for nearly two centuries now. It must be the longest such event in world history.
John Tebbel, “Foreword”, Under Cover: An Illustrated History of American Mass Market Paperbacks by Thomas L. Bonn
When John Tebbel wrote these words in 1982, he may have had a notion that the paperback revolution was about to take another turn. Just two years later, Gary Fisketjon would launch Vintage Contemporaries at Vintage Books, bringing together consequential contemporary American literature with the distinct book design of Lorraine Louie and a savvy marketing sensibility to create a winning line of paperback fiction. Striking gold with the publication of Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, the imprint continued to publish paperback editions of notable authors throughout the 1980s and 1990s. The imprint still exists today, although it has not retained the cachet it once possessed.
Vintage Contemporaries came to my attention when I read the novels of Jay McInerney and his VC imprint-mate Thomas McGuane in the mid 2010s, but I later learned of the imprint’s significance through the Talking Covers oral history published online in 2012, which remains a definitive resource for the imprint. Vintage Contemporaries is still an important point of reference for discussions of American literature and publishing trends in the 1980s, and many people have shared their fondness for the imprint around the internet. Yet, other than Talking Covers, I found there were few, if any, other resources available. This website, The Vintage Contemporaries Bibliography, is a project to continue exploration of the imprint.
This project has three particular aims.
First, to definitively document the books published in the Vintage Contemporaries imprint using the standard tools of bibliographical description. This project will both list and describe all books published as Vintage Contemporaries from its inception in 1984 through 1999. 1984 is the year the imprint debuted, while 1999 is a convenient boundary that nonetheless encompasses enough of the imprint’s lifespan to capture its development over time. 1999 is also the year that series designer Lorraine Louie passed away.
Second, with the bibliography serving as an evidential foundation, this project will track how the distinctive original Vintage Contemporaries design shifted, loosened, transformed, and ultimately vanished over the course of its existence. The attendant hypothesis is that the shifting cover design mirrors shifting editorial concerns for and conceptions of the series; through these concerns and conceptions we can understand how the series changed over time, which is also the story of how the series lost its sparkle. Stated simply, I contend that the series transitioned from culturally upstream to culturally downstream. In the early days, the imprint’s own titles were its priority and the fiction was the animating impulse. Later, it seems to have become simply a useful venue to support an author’s new hardcover with a paperback reissue of an older work, i.e. the other book becomes the priority and marketing the animating impulse. But we’ll see where the investigation takes us.
Third, the bibliography will also serve as a foundation for a concurrent investigation, which will reappraise the Vintage Contemporaries imprint. In general, I want to weigh the imprint and its publications against its popular and critical appraisals, both contemporary and retrospective, and test whether such appraisals have accurately characterized Vintage Contemporaries. My hypothesis is that Vintage Contemporaries, as an imprint, has largely been under-appreciated as a result of a few shallow associations with negative literary types.
For a list of all titles published in the imprint, see List of Vintage Contemporaries.
I hope you will enjoy exploring Vintage Contemporaries as much as I do.
Note: I am not affiliated with Vintage Contemporaries, Vintage Books, or Penguin Random House. This is a personal project.