Why do classic novels have to look boring and worthy? Many publishers are giving them a new image, writes Anna Carey

Classic novels have long been seen as the porridge of the fiction world - very good for you, of course, but not particularly enjoyable. The sort of stodgy thing you plough your way through because you know you ought to, and heave a sigh of relief when you've finally finished. This idea has, in the past, been reinforced by the publishers.

Over the past six decades classic books usually appeared with cover blurbs whose writers seemed to assume that no one would ever read the books for pleasure. Hugely readable books such as Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone and Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters were presented as dry academic texts, between covers whose illustrations were apparently randomly chosen from a big book of particularly ugly Victorian paintings.

"There was a lot of brown, wasn't there?" Adam Freudenheim says of the bad old covers. Freudenheim is the director of Penguin Classics, and is the man behind the launch of Red Classics, Penguin's first new permanent classic imprint in 40 years. He realised that "we publish the best fiction in the world, but that's not how we present them." Books were published as classics first and gripping novels second. This is where Red Classics comes in.

Unlike the standard "black" Penguin classics, whose covers and spines use the same design with different cover images, every Red title looks different, visually linked only by their red endpapers and a small logo on the back cover. And, unlike the black Penguin classics, they don't have introductions or footnotes. They stand alone, as they did when they were first published. "Publishing these books the same way as contemporary fiction reaches a different audience, a younger audience, people who might be intimidated by the notes and introduction of a classic," says Freudenheim.

Today's book market is increasingly competitive. Every year, hundreds of new books compete for the attention of potential readers, helped by special offers and lavish promotional campaigns. With so much attention paid to new arrivals, publishers have to constantly reinvent the older books on their lists, which can mean temporarily reissuing books in new editions. In 1998 Penguin launched "Essential Penguins", modern(ish) classics from Cold Comfort Farm to Down and Out in Paris and London packaged like contemporary work in stylish new editions. In 2002 it did the same thing for 19th-century fiction with the Summer Classics.

Recently Vintage Classics packaged 12 novels, including All Quiet on the Western Front and For Whom the Bell Tolls as classic works of war literature, and later this year, classic modern novels by writers from Asia will appear as Vintage East. "The back list never gets a look-in unless you do promotions like this," says Vintage's editor Rachel Cugnoni.

"They are at the back of the bookshop, and when people walk into a shop they get distracted by the tables selling three for the price of two. So they might never reach the classics at the back."

And if they do, then design is important. "The fact is, people do judge a book by its cover," says Donna Coonan, the editor of Virago Modern Classics. "If a book looks outdated and neglected, as if the publisher hasn't given it a thought for years, then why would anyone think it deserves their time and money?"

SPECIAL EDITIONS OF certain books are one thing, but permanent classic imprints also have to move with the times. Three years ago Penguin relaunched its general classics imprint. It changed the standard design, but perhaps most importantly, it also changed the blurbs on the back of the books. Just a few years ago, the blurb of Penguin's Jane Eyre began with this snappy sentence: "Transmuted by the rare Bronte imagination, the romance of Jane and Rochester takes on a strange and unforgettable atmosphere that lifts it above the level of mere melodrama." Who are Jane and Rochester? What is this book actually about? Who cares! This blurb, unlike those given to contemporary works of fiction, is aimed at people who already know all about the book.

But the blurb of the current Penguin Classic edition opens like this: "Orphaned Jane Eyre grows up in the home of her heartless aunt, where she endures loneliness and cruelty, and at a charity school with a harsh regime. This troubled childhood strengthens Jane's natural independence and spirit - which prove necessary when she finds a position as governess at Thornfield Hall."

If you want references to the transmutational power of the author's imagination, go read the introduction.

Hodder Headline are going one step further - in May, they'll release new editions of all of Jane Austen's novels, complete with jaunty blurbs and chick-lit pink covers. The books are billed as "classic romances".

Despite these welcome changes, the word "classic" can still be intimidating. "I think the 'classic' label does turn people off, but I think it's not so much the label as the context in which the label appears," says Freudenheim. " There was a discussion internally at Penguin about whether we should actually call the Reds "classics", and I was very keen that we did, because I want to reinvent the idea of what a classic is and broaden it. That's why we included more recent texts, like [ Donna Tartt's 1992 novel] The Secret History."

But what does make a book a classic? There is a general consensus that it's simply a book that stands up to the test of time, a book that still works long after its initial hype has faded, that still says something to those who read it long after it was written.

This definition isn't a problem when it comes to literal classics, such as the Aeneid, or 19th-century masterpieces. But what about choosing which books get the accolade of "modern classics"?

"You have to be careful about choosing something too recent," says Freudenheim. "I do think only time will tell. The question is, how much time? I think you've got to give a book at least 10 years after publication to see if it stands up."

Some people think that you can tell if a book is a classic a lot sooner than that - in fact, just three years will do. Last year Vintage asked 48 reading groups in libraries across Britain to choose 15 books from the 20th and 21st centuries which they thought would be considered classics in 100 years' time. The chosen novels included four books from the first few years of this century. Will The Time-Traveller's Wife really be beloved in 2106? It's hard not to see this as the literary equivalent of that British poll which declared that Robbie Williams was more musically influential than Bob Dylan.

Of course, one never can tell - even today's trashy potboiler can be tomorrow's classic. Few Victorian critics could have predicted that Ellen Wood's melodramatic bestseller East Lynne or Mary Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret would ever be described as a literary classics, yet that's how they're now published by Penguin.

Perhaps these books deserve the classics title simply because they are enormously entertaining today, while many loftier Victorian texts, full of moralising digressions, are unreadable and have rightly been forgotten. And not every melodrama works 150 years later - there's unlikely to be an Ouida revival any time soon - indicating that there is something truly remarkable about those that do.

THIS GOES FOR 20th-century blockbusters too - Virago have issued Valley of the Dolls and Peyton Place as Modern Classics. But they didn't appear with the green jackets which once characterised Virago's output. Some classics imprints, like Virago Modern Classics and now Red, are rejecting the notion of uniform editions, making each book look individual rather than part of a series. But Nicola Beauman believes that a strong brand identity is important. She is the founder of Persephone books, whose beautifully produced reissues of lost classics by women have gathered a devoted following. "It's about trust," she says. "The idea is that if you buy one Persephone book you'll like another, and that's helped by the fact that they look the same."

The classics label may turn some people off, but it can also attract extra readers, meaning that some books are published in both classic and non-classic editions. "You want to give a novel the authority of classics status, but you worry that it will alienate people who think that a classic is something boring you have to read at school. So there's a standard edition of Catch 22, and there's another in the classics livery," says Vintage's Rachel Cugnoni.

"There will be an audience of people who specifically scan the classics shelves, and they might see the book and think, 'that's something I've always been meaning to read'. It opens up a new market. The classic edition of Catch 22 sold 12,000 copies last year, and the standard edition sold 33,000. But before we did the classic, we still sold about 33,000 copies, so the classics livery attracted an extra 12,000 readers."

But the idea of a classic as inaccessible, as hard work "but worth it", persists. Ruth Rendell declared that "a classic may not be easy to read, but [ it] demands care and concentration and will seldom have much immediate appeal to those whose past reading has been thin on the ground or confined to the lightest of fiction." Which rules out Northanger Abbey, A Room with a View, A Handful of Dust and many other novels which can be easily read, enjoyed and appreciated, even by those unfortunate plebians whose reading has previously been "confined to light fiction".

But if attitudes like Rendell's are common, it's not surprising that one reading group member who took part in Vintage's search for future classics told the Guardian that one of the most asked questions when defining a classic was, "can we enjoy it or does it have to be worthy?". The idea that an enjoyable book isn't a worthy one is still here, but as publishers are trying to remind us, there's no reason that classic fiction can't be both.