Description
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewBarchas is indeed the ultimate Austen book hunter, and we are the grateful recipients of her obsession.
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Austenprose - A Jane Austen BlogOver the last 25 years, amid the releases of various screen adaptations imagining new lives for her novels, the critical conversation around Jane Austen has been much occupied with the diverse responses of her diverse reading communities: academic and popular, elite and fan-based. Janine Barchas's exuberantly illustrated study,
The Lost Books of Jane Austen, rides this wave with panache.
—Kathryn Sutherland,
New York TimesJanine Barchas leads her readers on a journey into the bibliographically uncharted land of unidentified reprints and cast-off mass-marketed paperbacks to discover who was reading Austen and when and why. As a study of packaging and design, it is lavishly illustrated, but that is a mere bonus to the author's brilliant thesis and erudite delivery. Even if Austen isn't your cup of tea, this volume will change the way you think about publishers and readers. It's a landmark in the scholarship of book history.
—Rebecca Rego Barry,
Fine Books & CollectionsFor all the Janeites on your list, reach for
The Lost Books of Jane Austen . . . it's a fascinating, richly illustrated study of what we can learn from the numerous popular editions of Austen's novels that appeared during the 19th and 20th centuries.
—Michael Dirda,
The Washington PostIn addition to the vivid reproductions and Barchas' careful narrative of Austen's publishing history,
The Lost Books of Jane Austen connects surviving cheap editions with their owners, and Barchas shares what she's found of their histories. It makes for an unexpectedly personal touch in this scholarly tome – one that makes you feel that any copy of Austen's work you have has value to history, and by extension, you do, too.
—Robert Faires,
The Austin Chronicle. . . a beautifully illustrated exploration, indeed compendium, of the popular editions of Austen's novels that have appeared over the last two centuries . . . The lesson of this delicious book is that [Jane Austen] was even more popular for even longer with an even greater variety of readers than we ever thought.
—John Mullan,
The GuardianThe history of Austen's popularity is the subject of Janine Barchas's important and groundbreaking
The Lost Books of Jane Austen. Barchas is a book historian, with access to an extraordinary private collection of Jane Austen editions. Drawing on far-ranging evidence, she examines popular books that did not make it into scholarly libraries.
—Paula Byrne,
Times Literary SupplementCompelling reading, both as social history and as literary detective work . . . [
The Lost Books of Jane Austen] will delight Janeites and bibliophiles in equal measure. An outstanding addition to any book-lover's library.
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Jane Austen's Regency WorldIt's not hard to find books on books, but like any self-reflective medium, it's harder to find preaching that carries beyond the chorus. Remarkably,
The Lost Books of Jane Austen by Janine Barchas a University of Texas English professor and Austen scholar finds something fresh to say about the exhaustedly-mined author. It's a visual study of Austen's publishing history that, in many ways, provides a wider history of how early popular novels traveled across borders and class.
—Christopher Borrelli,
Chicago TribuneBarchas provides the deep historical substratum that underlies [Austen's] enduring popularity and marketability.
—Louis J. Kern,
The Key ReporterIf you have any serious interest at all in Jane Austen, then YOU MUST READ THIS BOOK.
—Susannah Fullerton, President of the Jane Austen Society of Australia
I laughed, I cried, I learned — I was wowed!
—Deborah Barnum,
JASNA NewsBarchas has written a superbly original book, a work of literary archaeology, and the icing on the cake is that it's a beautifully produced publication in its own right – filled with over a hundred colour photographs of various editions of Austen that are as gorgeous as the couture on show in
Emma, the latest film version of one of her novels.
—Sean Sheehan,
The PrismaA beautiful, completely unexpected (to me) spectacularly illustrated, wonderfully researched book about publishing, Jane Austen, her readership (and its academic misapprehension), and more. The pages turn themselves and there's a WOW! on every page, often several of them in a paragraph.
—Jack Cella,
The Book Beat[A] powerful, beautifully timed and precisely sequenced book.
—Tony Voss,
The Jane Austen Society of AustraliaAn enjoyable book to browse, with its beautiful illustrations,
The Lost Books of Jane Austen describes a journey of hands-on research that may well kindle, or rekindle, enthusiasm for a form of archival work that often needs to leave the archives. The sheer amount of research is impressive, providing a slew of materials for further analysis and rediscovery work.
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Modern Language Quarterlyboth entertaining and profound...The story Barchas tells is dynamic and playful, moving with the speed of the trains whose rise to prominence made the Railway Editions discussed throughout the book such a ready venue for the popular dispersal of Austen novels.
—Erin M. Goss,
European Romantic Reviewanother ground-breaking work.
—Gill Ballinger, University of the West of England,
Modern Language Review. . . a fascinating monograph that delves into the history of those forgotten books.
—Raquel C. Pico,
Yorokobu MagazineIlluminating....Barchas's observant eye for the details of fonts and engraving, her inventiveness and persistence of approach, allow her to build on the ironic tension between ephemera, preservation, and remembrance, offering an important alternative history not just of Austen's canonization but also of a lost diversity of readerships and the institutionalization and decay of literary scholarship.
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Eighteenth-Century StudiesTable of ContentsPreface
Vignette I. Marianne & Gertrude
Introduction. Austen on the Cheap
Vignette II. Emma at the Seaside
Chapter 1. Paperback Fighter: Austen for the People
Vignette III. The Old Sea Captain & William Price
Chapter 2. Sense, Sensibility, and Soap: Lever Promotions in the 1890s
Vignette IV. Charlotte & a Real Castle
Chapter 3. Looking Divine: Wrapping Austen in the Religious
Vignette V. Young Heman's Summer in Paris
Chapter 4. Selling with Paintings: A Curious History of the Cheap Prestige Reprint
Vignette VI. Lady Isabella's Mansfield Park
Chapter 5. Pinking Jane Austen: The Turn to "Chick Lit"
Vignette VII. Annie's Prized Gift
Coda
Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Works Cited
Index
