Vintage 10th anniversary competition

Win 100 books of your choice and celebrate a decade of great writing

Next month, the paperback imprint Vintage will mark ten years of high-quality publishing with promotions in bookshops around the country, a national roadshow and a new website launched on 6 September (www.randomhouse.co.uk/vintage). To help celebrate, Vintage and The Independent have joined forces for a competition that offers the overall winner the pick of any 100 books from the Vintage catalogue.

Next month, the paperback imprint Vintage will mark ten years of high-quality publishing with promotions in bookshops around the country, a national roadshow and a new website launched on 6 September (www.randomhouse.co.uk/vintage). To help celebrate, Vintage and The Independent have joined forces for a competition that offers the overall winner the pick of any 100 books from the Vintage catalogue.

The Vintage range is vast, embracing fiction from Martin Amis and Philip Roth to Jeanette Winterson and Margaret Atwood; modern classics from Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka to Graham Greene; biography from the likes of Peter Ackroyd and Michael Holroyd; travel from Bruce Chatwin, science from Stephen Jay Gould... and hundreds of other titles. Ten runners-up will win any ten books of their choice from the Vintage catalogue.

As part of its 10th birthday bash, Vintage asked booksellers to choose their top ten titles from the imprint's list. The results were as follows:

1 Louis de Berniÿres, Captain Corelli's Mandolin

2 Sebastian Faulks, Birdsong

3 Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

4 A S Byatt, Possession

5 Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

6 Ian McEwan, Enduring Love

7 Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

8 Joseph Heller, Catch-22

9 Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

10 Toni Morrison, Beloved

It's a mixed bunch, as you can see, but two of the novelists here shared a profession before full-time authorship: Salman Rushdie and Joseph Heller both worked in advertising agencies. And so we would like you to devise a ten-word slogan to advertise each one of these ten Vintage books.

Would "At a stroke, a magical land of stories is born" attract new readers to Midnight's Children? Could "Laugh? You'll nearly die. Thousands did. But nobody knew why" sell Catch-22 to a new generation? If you wanted to shift yet more copies of Captain Corelli's Mandolin, might "Amid the war's din, music was the food of love" help do the job? Probably not.

You'll be able to do much better, of course. Send us your ten ten-word slogans by Wednesday 20 September. The result will be announced in these pages on Saturday 30 September.

Conditions: 1/ Entries should be sent by mail, marked 'Vintage Competition' and containing your name and address, to:

Books Desk, 'The Independent', 1 Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London E.14 5DL. They can also be faxed, clearly marked, to 020 7293 2010.

2/ The closing date for entries is 20 September 2000.

3/ The judges' decision is final. No correspondence will be entered into. All normal rules for 'Independent' competitions will apply.