The Lost Books of Jane Austen by Janine Barchas

Author:Janine Barchas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2019-02-22T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

SELLING WITH PAINTINGS

A Curious History of the Cheap Prestige Reprint

The most ubiquitous visual marker of modern literary prestige—the signal that a book is a weighty literary classic—has its roots in yet another set of cheap unrecorded Austen reprintings. Those neglected reprints also provide a window onto an unanticipated aspect of Jane Austen’s nineteenth-century American reception: long periods of virtually zero public interest. I believe that critics may have misjudged the market for her books during the latter half of the nineteenth century because they based projections exclusively upon widely hailed American firsts. Only neglected reprints reveal fault lines unique to the nineteenth-century American book trade. The meager way that Austen was initially marketed and produced on this side of the Atlantic in no way resembled the crowded competition of nineteenth-century editions in Britain.

Look around the classic literature section of your local bookstore, and you encounter a plethora of book covers decorated with paintings of people and scenes that, even with little or no interpretive connection to their content, still send an unmistakable signal, sometimes aspirational, about a book’s claim to literary canonicity. This popular synesthetic marketing tactic is illogical. When and how did reproductions of oil paintings become associated with highbrow literature and serious editions, especially in an educational environment that increasingly isolates art history and painting from the reading of literature? Major publishers of paperbacks for today’s college schoolroom—including Oxford, Cambridge, and Penguin—predominantly place images of master paintings on the covers of their literary classics. The fact that many of these earnest volumes are inexpensive paperbacks rather than traditional hardbacks barely seems to matter. Price is no longer an index of a book’s canonical seriousness or importance. Quite the opposite, for the successful redesign of Penguin’s Black Classics paperbacks, a line of classic literature that in 2002 was decked out in matching black jackets ornamented with old paintings, successfully forged in the mind of the contemporary consumer, especially students, a strong link between master paintings and worthy canonical reading.1

Paintings as cover art for serious reading may be a relatively new marketing tool in the history of publishing, but it has embedded itself quickly into the very genome of bibliophiles and readers. Whereas the difference between hardback and paperback format once designated prestige, the divorce of content from physical book format with e-publishing and e-commerce increasingly emphasizes the cover graphic as the dominant signal of literary value. A few years ago, after I showed several hundred Jane Austen book covers during an evening slide lecture, one man enthusiastically responded that it was all very well to see so much creativity being exerted on behalf of a beloved author, but he, gesturing to a black-jacketed Penguin, preferred his classics to look like classics. He had missed the point of the lecture, in which I had tried to show that, during two centuries of reading Austen, her appearance as a printed book ranged across a wide spectrum, from highbrow to lowbrow. In my opinion, no fixed look for Austen is more

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