Ah....the world of books...always fascinating to me!
"Over 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.
Austen too tried to understand and take some control of the market for her fiction — conning sales figures, aggregating reader opinions and pushing for reissues. She learned these tricks the hard way, from her own lost books. Having sold the copyright on her most popular novel, “Pride and Prejudice” (1813), she watched the profits from its second and third editions go straight into the pocket of her publisher, Thomas Egerton. The contemporary publishing model did not work in Austen’s favor. With the price of a new book higher than the average weekly wage, readership was not matched by ownership: “People are more ready to borrow & praise, than to buy,” she wrote in an 1814 letter, “which I cannot wonder at.”
