The Lost Books of Jane Austen

... 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.

The 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.

Compelling 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.

It'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.

Barchas provides the deep historical substratum that underlies [Austen's] enduring popularity and marketability.

If you have any serious interest at all in Jane Austen, then YOU MUST READ THIS BOOK.

I laughed, I cried, I learned — I was wowed!

Barchas 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.

A 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.

[A] powerful, beautifully timed and precisely sequenced book.

An 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.

both 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.

another ground-breaking work.

... a fascinating monograph that delves into the history of those forgotten books.

Illuminating....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.

A major new work by Janine Barchas, an outstanding critic both of Jane Austen and of book history. The Lost Books of Jane Austen is cogent and persuasive.

This ferociously researched book proves that a fresh set of methods can teach us something new about even this much-studied author. Barchas's innovatively defined evidence base steers a middle course between traditional interest in letters, diaries, and published criticism as sources of reception history, and the interest in kitsch collectibles and fan fiction that began several decades ago.

Before Jane Austen was great, she was popular, Janine Barchas contends in this original, often audacious study. Thanks to Barchas's tremendous talents as book historian and book sleuth, we have new tools with which to assess that popularity and a new model of how to write reception history.

In this groundbreaking, exquisitely researched, and stunningly illustrated book, Janine Barchas uncovers the unsung and ordinary editions—the 'lost' books—that profoundly shaped Austen's afterlife and evolving literary reputation. The Lost Books of Jane Austen proves once and for all that accounts of the once-forgotten Austen, the elite Austen, and the chick-lit Austen are perfectly partial. It's absolutely delightful to discover, thanks to Barchas, all that we've missed.

Janine Barchas's new book makes a fascinating breakthrough in print history, opening up a fresh 'everyday' history of publishing and reading that goes far beyond elite publishers and libraries. Her visually resplendent study is based on an innovative research method in which Ebay auctions and private collections count as much as any traditional print archive. A scholarly performance not to be missed.

Janine Barchas demonstrates that literary works are canonized not by first editions, but by cheap reprints. She has tracked down tattered Victorian volumes of Jane Austen, the ephemeral publications through which Austen reached a mass audience. This is a strikingly innovative approach to the history of reading, which illuminates how popular books become Great Books.