Verso, a publishing house specializing in critical leftist titles, plans to mark the 150th anniversary of The Communist Manifesto with an "up-market" edition of the book. Publisher Colin Robinson is targeting the book not at the proletariat, but at "up-scale shoppers of fashion and furniture stores." Plans are underway to display the stylish red-and-black, cloth-bound edition at Barneys as well as at checkout counters of the Borders and Barnes & Noble superstores. All this will go into effect starting on May 1, the international worker's holiday. Robinson admits the marketing campaign is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but insists the goal is to encourage the widest possible readership of the book, especially among those he considers "quite well off but a little uncomfortable with capitalism."

Writing in the New York Times to mark the anniversary of the Manifesto's publication, Columbia University professor Steven Marcus downplayed the book's failed prophecies and instead praised its artfulness, noting that it "possesses a structural complexity and a denseness of thematic play that we ordinarily associate with great works of the literary imagination." The book, he says, opens as Gothic tale, but its metaphors quickly segue to those of fairy tales, then to the Arabian Nights, then, by a "generative fecundity," to intimations of "Goethe's Faust, Byron's Manfred, Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, and a host of other modern and mythological dramatizations." According to Marcus, "Such trains of metaphoric figures and images are part of the dense local intertwinements that constitute the microstructure of the Manifesto's linguistic fabric and argument."

[Ed.: The book's cover art features a dramatic painting of a red flag against a black background that the artist intended as ironic mockery of the Social Realist style of art made popular under Stalin's regime. The artist is reportedly baffled at its use in promoting communism's source text.]

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