The birth of the Wordsworth Collector’s Editions……..It wasn’t so long ago that the printed book was fighting, and losing, a grim battle for survival. The irresistible rise of Amazon’s Kindle, from its launch in 2007, seemed to many to spell the end of the line for these cumbersome, archaic stacks of processed wood pulp. The eBook’s inexorable progress continued and peaked in 2014, but then plateaued, then surprisingly fell away as the printed book came roaring back to life.

While there were many of us that were never tempted by the allure of this new technology, there were also many that found themselves missing the simple pleasure of choosing and handling books and, perhaps, in coming back to them fell in love with them all over again.

One of the spin-offs of this resurgence was increasing diversity in the form that a book might take, leading the publication of ‘collectable’ editions that were objects of beauty in their own right, soon to be shared via social media and a new invention: the ‘shelfie’.

Here at Wordsworth, having spent the last twenty-five years bringing classic literature to people around the world in quality editions at the lowest possible price, the ‘Collectable’ hardback was largely unfamiliar territory for us, but during our regular saunters around bookshops, the idea grew that this was something we should offer. Of course, being Wordsworth, we wanted to stand out from the crowd, so we set out to come up with a series that was at least as good, if not better, in quality and design as anything already out there but at a substantially lower price. And we think we’ve succeeded with our Collector’s Editions!

Nichola, one of our directors, took charge of the project and came up with the overall design concept then, linking up with illustrator Claire Shorrock, turned the concept into reality. The project became something of a race against time as Nichola was expecting twins but she just made it – Logan and Olivia entered the world a couple of weeks before the books were published! And we couldn’t be happier about both events…

We had decided to concentrate on timeless children’s classics, so the full list is as follows:

9781840227789 Little Women – Louisa May Alcott

9781840227895 Peter Pan – J.M. Barrie

9781840227796 The Secret Garden – E.H. Burnett

9781840227802 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

9781840227819 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

9781840227826 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

9781840227833 The Jungle Book – Rudyard Kipling

9781840227840 Anne of Green Gables – Lucy Montgomery

9781840227857 The Railway Children – Edith Nesbitt

9781840227864 The Little Prince – A de Saint-Exupery

9781840227871 Black Beauty – Anna Sewell

9781840227888 Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson

These compact hardbacks are cloth-bound, with matching coloured endpaper and embossed gold and coloured blocking to enhance their beautiful, bespoke cover illustrations. The retail price is £6.99.

We’ve been delighted by the reception the series has received and we are already having hastily planned reprints to ensure we have enough stock in before the Christmas rush. We are grateful to beautifulbooks for their wonderful review

Find out more about the Collectors Editions series.

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The full story of Dickens and Christmas.

We sometimes wonder what you on the receiving end think lies behind these posts. Do you visualise Wordsworth HQ as a towering steel and glass edifice glimmering in the Hertfordshire winter sunshine? The content produced by a team of chain-smoking staff writers working long into the night to produce this polished prose?

The truth could hardly be more different – we languidly pass away the hours in a virtually unlocatable Grade 2 listed building in the little town of Ware, the sort of little town that lends itself to the automatic use of the word ‘sleepy’. While this might not be strictly accurate, we would have to admit that on the sleepy/vibrant scale, we rarely crank it up past three.

That said, we do move up a couple of notches in December. There are two regular early signs that Christmas is coming to Ware. Firstly, the council put up the Christmas lights. Probably the kindest word that could be applied to them is ‘durable’ and we suspect they were purchased in the year that gas lighting was phased out.

The second is the Ware Dickensian Evening which happens in early December every year. Dickens and Christmas will always be linked, although it is surprising to find just how many of our Christmas traditions date back to his time – for the full story, see below.

Of course, some Christmas traditions date back much further to pagan times and the druids (East Herts District Council turned down the concept of a druid evening; the same narrow thinking that rejected the annual May Day Wicker Man competition). Christmas Day was first celebrated in the year 336 but was closely aligned with the druid celebrations of the Winter Solstice, and the original Christmas tree originated with the Yule Tree, on which gifts to the pagan gods were hung. The theory that Black Friday dates back to druids scrambling in an unseemly manner for cut-price mistletoe seems less likely.

But whatever your beliefs and whatever traditions you adhere to, we hope your December isn’t too frantic and that your works Christmas party fulfils all of the modern traditions that they have become linked with. Cheers!

And now here, as promised, is the full story of Dickens and Christmas:

*****

Christmas means different things to different people – and all individual families have their own slightly quirky yuletide traditions, right?

Because we’re writing to you from the UK, let us tell you what we think signifies Christmas in a millennial Britain: Supermarkets are filled with bargain-priced, oversized tins of Quality Street chocolates (which will be replaced at least four times before December 25th); Michael Bublé will appear and reappear on our TVs, coming out from wherever he has been hiding all year, like Santa Claus himself; and talking of TV, you’ll know it’s nearly Christmas when your mother buys her one and only annual copy of the Radio Times to ‘see what’s on telly over the festive season’ – even though TVs tell you that for free these days.

We could go on and on about what makes up a quintessentially ‘British Christmas’, but where do our (often non-religious) traditional customs originate from?

Two words: Charles Dickens. While he certainly didn’t ‘invent’ Christmas, you could argue that he reinvented it.

There are, literally, dozens of books written on the subject and many a scholar claims that Dickens is the ‘father of the modern Christmas,’ for want of a better phrase.

Here are five of the most prominent ways in which your Christmas has secular Dickensian undertones:

1. Prince Albert brought the concept of the Christmas Tree to Britain from Germany in 1840, but it was Dickens who promoted it to the masses and made it a widespread custom. From his first Christmas story to the many that followed, the protagonists often had trees prominently placed in their homes…

2. The exchanging of gifts – Price Albert via Germany again, but his gifts were originally exchanged on New Year’s Day. However, in A Christmas Carol, we see a father giving Christmas gifts to his children, which Dickens reinforced time and time again in his stories, often giving great prominence to this pioneering idea…

3. Christmas carolling… was a part of Victorian life before Dickens and had already undergone something of a revival in his lifetime. However, by simply calling his most popular Christmas novel A Christmas Carol – and including the act within his narrative – he was further ingraining the act into his readers’ minds and redefining what a typical, perfect Christmas scene should look like.

4. A white Christmas… (at least in the suburbs of North London) is as rare as this member of the Wordsworth team not eating an entire pack of mince pies in one sitting. But by some miracle, it happened to snow on Christmas day for eight consecutive years when Dickens was a child. As a result, we are literally ‘dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones [Dickens] used to know.’

5. ‘Bah! Humbug’. Need we say more?

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