The Liverpool-based design studio Dorothy has created a wonderful series of colorful stamps based on 20th century literary works. Their Modern Classics collection, above, reimagines the covers of the 42 titles in clever and imaginative ways.

They have reimagined the 42 essential modern books as a series of oversized postage stamps beginning with James Joyce’s extraordinary Ulysses and finishing with Colson Whitehead’s brutal and beautiful Pulitzer Prizewinning The Underground Railroad.

Other modern classics include The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, The Color Purple by Alice Walker, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami, Beloved by Toni Morrison, American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis, The Road by Cormac McCarthy and White Teeth by Zadie Smith.

Each stamp features a graphic inspired by the book and the date of publication (in book form). Dorothy’s stamp prints of Modern Classics are available for purchase on their website.