Book Buying

[poliphilo]

We go to the bookshop to buy Jane Austen. The Complete Works.

And we see this hardback boxed set, with the texts printed on Bible paper edged in gold (quite unnecessary) costing no more than a clutch of decent paperbacks.

What's not to like?

Well- one thing really; they have the early 20th century illustrations by Hugh Thomson- which are very charming but wrong.

I'd rather not have my novels illustrated. I want to imagine things my own way. Only kids books should be illustrated.

And to illustrate Austen is a violation of her aesthetic. Her lightness and swiftness are bound up with her refusal of description. What does Mr Bingley look like? He has a black hat and a blue coat.

Hugh Thomson's pictures are all about bonnets and frocks. Austen could care less.

But I've seen the Austen films. My vision is already corrupted. I can't help but see her characters as Emma Thompson, Kate Winslett, Hugh Grant and Colin Firth. Pemberley is forever Lyme Park.

What further harm can Thomson do?

And hard covers, Bible paper, gold edges.....

We buy them.

We also buy a copy of Anne Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolfo (roughly contemporary with Austen.) I read it on the train coming back from town. Radcliffe is all description. Her heroine lives in the foothills of the Pyrenees and spends her time collecting botanical specimens and playing the lute in mountain glades. Sooner or later she's going to be abducted by brigands and it can't happen a page too soon.

Comments

[sorenr.livejournal.com]

Oh, you must read Udolpho just before you read Northanger Abbey... Priceless combo!!! (There's nothing like intertextuality, especially mocking intertextuality! :-P)

[geodesus-christ.livejournal.com]

How do you feel about the John Tenniel drawings in Alice in Wonderland? I've read that they're really important to the book for a variety of reasons; personally I think they're interesting but they take away as much as they add.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Sooner later she's going to be abducted by brigands and it can't happen a page too soon.

Your kind of novel, all right!

Congratulations on a super find.

(I was at a used book sale late this afternoon; they were closing in thirty minutes, and had just cut the prices in half. I raked books off the shelf until I filled a box--got Kate some children's books for her school library collection and some old novels from authors I liked long ago.)

[idahoswede.livejournal.com]

If you ever DO regret the purchase on Bible paper, DO keep me first in line to relieve you of them.

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

oh, yum!

All the books you talk about, the way you talk about them, now I want to read them - the ones I haven't read, and the ones I HAVE read - again.

There isn't enough time. I'd have to give something up. LJ isn't an option. Maybe my JOB?

I'll put Mysteries of Udolfo on that long growing list.

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

But I've seen the Austen films. My vision is already corrupted. I can't help but see her characters as Emma Thompson, Kate Winslett, Hugh Grant and Colin Firth. Pemberley is forever Lyme Park.

Who was that anemic blonde who played the second daughter in P&P?

Oh...you mean that wasn't REALLY Pemberly?

Sigh.

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

But I've seen the Austen films. My vision is already corrupted. I can't help but see her characters as Emma Thompson, Kate Winslett, Hugh Grant and Colin Firth. Pemberley is forever Lyme Park

You remind me here of something that happened to me a few years ago. A&E ran, on Sunday nights, programs based on EM Forster's *Horatio Hornblower*. I was hooked. I admit that I was hooked because young Hornblower was played by the most gorgeous man I'd ever seen...young Ioan Gruffud. Immediately after the last program in the first series was broadcast I was at the library, and I developed a taste for those books...I'm almost all the way through the series now.
I admit Horatio will always be that curly haired brown eyed full lipped...oh, excuse me I'm drooling in the keyboard...