Imagine you have a sudden burning desire to read David Copperfield, Charles Dickens’s favourite of all his novels. Thanks to Project Gutenberg, you could read it for nothing online but, correctly reasoning that it would be tedious to scroll through 600 pages on a screen, you go to a bookshop. There you find that David Copperfield is available as an Everyman Classic hardback, a Penguin Classic paperback, an Oxford University Press paperback and a Vintage Classic paperback, all designed in pleasing formats, heftily branded and with paintings or artful imagery on their covers, along with introductory essays by university professors, a chronology of Dickens’s life and a scholarly trove of explanatory notes.

Which do you choose? Why that one? Because it has the most beautiful cover? Because it looks more “collectable” for your library shelf at home? Because the colour scheme matches the decor of your living room? Because the introduction is by Professor John Sutherland, say, rather than Norman Carpet from Nowheresville? Think carefully before you choose, because British publishers are putting lots of money and energy into guessing what the new generation of classics buyers wants. This year, the four major contenders – Penguin, OUP, Everyman and Vintage – are experimenting with radical new looks, designs and branding strategies, in the hope of snaring their long-term loyalty.

There’s a lot at stake. From Aristotle to Zola, the classics market is huge. According to Tom Tivnan of the Bookseller magazine, annual sales of classic texts currently stand at £25m, an increase of 10% since 2010. There’s been a noticeable upswing in the number of publishers doing the classics, whether offering cheap editions (like Wordsworth Classics, £1.99 each) or super-deluxe editions on quality paper stock (like the Pushkin, Alma, Persephone and Fitzcarraldo houses). It’s as though British publishing has suddenly realised that anyone can flog a work that’s out of copyright – usually 70 years after the author’s death – and they don’t have to pay royalties. This year, publishers have been ghoulishly marking the anniversaries of authors who died in 1946, especially HG Wells (August 13) and Damon Runyon (December 10). And classics publishers can make a lot from TV or film adaptations: the bestselling classic this year is War and Peace, with 54,000 copies sold by 10 publishing houses, compared with 12,000 last year. Many classics also see a gratifying spike in sales if they appear on the reading lists of GCSE, A-level or BA syllabuses.

TV adaptations can casuse a massive spike in sales of classic books … James Norton and Lily James in the BBC’s War and Peace. Photograph: BBC/Laurie Sparham

The competition between houses is, consequently, intense, and many bold initiatives of marketing and packaging are being tried this year. Most startling is Penguin Classics’ launch of the new-look 20 Penguin Pocket Classics. The books’ main feature is stripped back simplicity: no oil painting on the cover, no artwork or imagery, no introductory essay. The blurb for each book is a single sentence. The jackets are coded in single colours according to the author’s nationality, as the first Penguin Classics were in 1947: blue for French (here represented by Zola’s The Beast Within), red for Russian (Tolstoy’s The Cossacks) and so forth. It’s a stark, functional, slightly garish look, a complete break from the “classic” Penguin Classic that’s been standard since 1963 – black-spined and richly designed, with, on the cover, a full-colour reproduction of a painting that bears some relation to the contents.

The idea evolved from the wildly successful Little Black Classics brought out last year by Penguin publishing director Simon Winder: small format, monochrome booklets of 50 to 100 pages, costing 80p or £1, containing gobbets of poetry, essays, short stories and extracts of prose “curated” from Kipling, Dante, Browning, Darwin and Wilde. To everyone’s amazement, they sold 3m copies worldwide. The UK bestseller was The Communist Manifesto (can it have contributed to the rise of Jeremy Corbyn?) followed by Nietzsche’s Aphorisms of Love and Hate.

“There’s a Penguin Classics edition of Emily Brontë’s Complete Poems, of which we sell a few hundred a year,” says Winder. “But by choosing some of the poems, and packaging them for 80p, liberated from the large format, we sold 30,000 copies. An enormous audience for curated literature has suddenly been conjured up out of nothing.”

He asked art director Jim Stoddart to apply the same stripped-back treatment to 20 books from the Classics list. Ten more were published in August. The old-style Classics will still be available. But will the new design eventually be rolled out across the whole range? “It’s a recognition that we have to make books for different kinds of reader,” said Stoddart. “Some people are intimidated by covers with oil paintings. These are more friendly towards that kind of reader. To treat the books as dry academic pieces of literature is just wrong.”

Some of the earliest books to be published by Penguin Classics. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian

Penguin is using the considerable power of its brand name as the main marketing thrust. But a major change in the new format is the loss of critical bells and whistles – the “apparatus” considered vital for the student buyer.

“The student market is very important to us because we’re part of a university press,” says Luciana O’Flaherty of OUP World’s Classics. “It’s the core of what we do, which is why we have Introductions and Notes. After that, we have to have an attractive package, to look good on bookshelves. We hope that, if we get the readers when they’re students, they’ll collect us for ever. And some general readers will still want the critical apparatus that we provide. I think some mid-20th century books are hard to read without it.”

The World’s Classics imprint was created by a publisher called Grant Richards in 1901, to bring dramatic and classical literature to general readers in pocket sized hardbacks. OUP bought the list in 1905, opened their account with the King James Bible and targeted self-improving Edwardians: “Cheaply, and in little shelf space,” ran the publisher’s assurance, “the general reader can build up a library of those books which, having become a part of himself, he wishes now to make a part of his home.”

They were immediately popular. World’s Classics paperbacks, with their distinctive red and white livery, started life in 1983. “I think it was because of the increase in people going to university, and their need for texts,” says Julie Gough from OUP marketing. “University libraries used to buy OUP hardbacks, but fewer were doing so, and students wanted to buy their own books.” After two relaunches, the World’s Classics lists now runs to 790 titles in handsome matt covers, featuring cunningly cropped artworks.

Jackets are like sweet papers, and it’s difficult to sell sweets without a wrapper

This autumn, though, they’re offering something new: a range of hardbacks offering “unique content” – a collection of an author’s works that hasn’t been presented this way before, or a new translation of a classic. Their design is flamboyantly simple: no dust jacket but a cloth binding, a cream background on which title and author are printed vertically with a single tiny image on the top. Gothic Tales by Arthur Conan Doyle features a descending crow, Homer’s Odyssey shows an image of Odysseus dwarfed by the cyclops Polyphemus, Poems of the First World War offers a soldier’s helmet. They look fantastic – but who are they for? “We’re working a lot with the production team to make them look very collectible and tactile, to appeal to the gift market,” says Gough.

In 1906, a year after OUP World’s Classics appeared, a master bookbinder called Joseph Dent founded Everyman’s Library, kicking off with Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson in two volumes. The son of a Darlington housepainter, Dent had educated himself through reading, and was determined to publish handsome editions of the world’s classic books at a shilling a pop. Though opportunistic publishers in the 1900s could bring out individual reprints of Ovid and Virgil in translation, Dent offered a multi-classic, build-your-own library in a William Morris-inspired livery that twined fruits and flowers over the title pages and endpapers.

From the 1920s to the 1940s, everyone bought their personal libraries of Herodotus, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton in flat-spined Everyman hardbacks. A paperback list was started in 1960 to rival Penguin and OUP, but in 1991 the company was sold and Everyman’s Library restarted as a “hardback permanent library of record” (as John Updike called it) under David Campbell, an old-school craftsman publisher. Using the French publisher Gallimard’s design model from 1912, he used sewn-cloth bindings, acid-free paper, silk ribbons and cream collection blanche jackets with black and red typography, for a look that’s timelessly elegant and had no truck with photographs, cover art or other such abominations.

The new Vintage Classics design for Jane Austen’s Emma. Photograph: Penguin Books

Until he changed his mind. “My children pointed out that I might be missing a trick by not having cover art like everyone else,” says Campbell, who this year celebrates 25 years in the business and has just seen his 27 millionth book printed in Germany. “We tried film tie-in covers, but it was a disaster. We had letters from all over the world saying, ‘We want a proper Everyman cover, not some frightful picture of a film star.’ So we stopped that. But I think a bit of variety does no harm. Jackets are like sweet papers, and it’s difficult to sell sweets without a wrapper.”

Of Everyman’s 650 titles, their Contemporary Classics series features cover photographs of authors, while their 850-page Annals and Histories by Tacitus is garishly frontaged by Hubert Robert’s painting The Burning of Rome. But Campbell’s main concession to the classics packaging war is in curating: his newest innovation has been the launch of Everyman’s Pocket Classics, gatherings of short stories – Bedtime Stories, Cat Stories, Christmas Stories, Paris Stories – garnered from collections already published by Everyman. All the books have been given a distinctive spine of pastel stripes, seemingly inspired by the acid greens and pale pinks of Sobranie Cocktail cigarettes. “It’s really very simple,” says Campbell. “Beautifully designed things sell better than badly designed ones.”

At Vintage Classics, they’re not plugging simplicity or stripped down design. Nor are they trying to attract students with academic paraphernalia. Vintage are unlike their rivals in extending the word “classic” to mean literary works by living writers (Amis, Barnes, McEwan, Rushdie). “It’s like a promise for the future that these books are here to stay,” says senior editor Frances McMillan. Their classics are instantly identifiable by their red spines, while their Introductions are by non-academic authors (such as Howard Jacobson on Catch-22) or cultural figures (Cerys Matthews on Cider with Rosie).

Their design template has long ignored the oil painting cover in favour of clever imagery. “It’s all about the desirability of books and what they say about you,” says art director Suzanne Dean. “As with your clothes, your room and your pictures, the books on your shelves are reflections of yourself, your taste.”

The newest designs for Vintage Classics bear out this philosophy: they deal in designs that might be seen on wallpaper, fabrics, rugs and mugs. There’s a special edition of Brontë novels (to celebrate the bicentenary of Charlotte’s birth) with spooky charcoal drawings by Sarah Gillespie, a set of Jane Austen novels with watercolour patterns by Leanne Shapton, a set of new Virginia Woolf covers by a Finnish textile designer.

Vintage Futures – a lenticular series of book covers by CMYK, the Vintage publishers design team.

Vintage are at the cutting edge of curatorial publishing – picking books (or bits of books) from the backlist and presenting them to readers in a new livery. “Every six months to a year,” says Dean, “the design department is given nine or 10 titles and a linking theme – 60s novels, historical novels, dystopian novels – and we come up with ideas.” A new set of dystopian fiction has prompted some startling results: a 3D cover for Brave New World, lenticular covers for the “Imagined Futures” SF books, in which a plastic rectangle laid over the cover of The Aerodrome by Rex Warner produces a gratifyingly wiggly Twilight Zone effect.

It’s a far cry from David Copperfield’s first appearance in 1849, when it was published in monthly instalments, with two illustrations – but thousands of people bought it just to find out what had become of Little Em’ly at the hands of her posh seducer, and nobody cared that there was nothing on the cover but words.