This bookshop is giving clickbait titles to all the classics

We’ve all heard of clickbait – headlines that use whatever means possible to get us to click on them. But what about “litbait”?

That’s what bookshop The Wild Detectives are calling their latest efforts to get people reading – or, as they put it, “trolling people into reading classics”.

“It’s not so much to make people read as it is to make reading culture more appealing,” Andres De la Casa-Huertas, who owns the shop, told the Dallas Observer. “I think there’s a space to make it much more funny and approachable.”

Here are some of their best efforts:

(Dracula by Bram Stoker)

(Romeo and Juliet)

(Machiavelli’s The Prince)

Other favourites include “British guy dies after selfie gone wrong" (The Picture of Dorian Gray) “When it’s OKAY to slut shame single mothers” (The Scarlet Letter) and “New synthetic drug is turning Londoners into violent maniacs” (The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde). 

The company has explained their campaign in this video – we definitely prefer it to regular clickbait.