Post­ed by Nat Bernstein

There’s noth­ing so thrilling as find­ing an intrigu­ing edi­tion of a book you love from who-knows-when to take home with you and place next to the oth­er sev­en copies of The Mas­ter and Mar­gari­ta (my per­son­al bib­lio­philic col­lectible of choice) on the shelf.

(Mov­ing past Russ­ian lit­er­a­ture of vary­ing trans­la­tion and cen­sor­ship,) I don’t think I’ve ever entered a used book store with­out tak­ing at least a glance at their Jane Austen stock­pile. Just to see what’s there — it’s not like I don’t already pos­sess mul­ti­ple copies of each nov­el across book­shelves and stor­age box­es in four dif­fer­ent states. So imag­ine my delight at dis­cov­er­ing Quirk Books’ forth­com­ing visu­al book, Jane Austen from Cov­er to Cov­er: 200 Years of Clas­sic Cov­ers!

“The cov­ers gath­ered in this vol­ume rep­re­sent two hun­dred years of pub­li­ca­tion, inter­pre­ta­tion, mar­ket­ing, and mis­ap­pre­hen­sions of Jane Austen’s works, but under­neath the vari­ety of images one thing remains the same: the text that left the pen of a woman in Hamp­shire, Eng­land, two cen­turies ago,” author and Austen­blog editrix Mar­garet C. Sul­li­van observes in her intro­duc­tion to Cov­er to Cov­er. ​“No mat­ter how beau­ti­ful, tacky, infu­ri­at­ing, beguil­ing, sil­ly, or strange the pack­ag­ing may be, the sto­ry inside nev­er changes.”

Relat­ed content:

• Writ­ing About Rela­tion­ships, Com­pos­ing Wit­ty Epi­grams, and the Com­plex­i­ties of Cor­re­spon­dence with Read­ers: a con­ver­sa­tion with Adelle Waldman
• Jane Austen and the French Rev­o­lu­tion by Joan­na Smith Rakoff
• Jane Austen in Scars­dale: Of Love, Death, and the SATs by Paula Marantz Cohen