A Circulating Library

All the interpretations of Pride and Prejudice that we’ve seen in this exhibit so far have been by authors and publishers. Those are often the people who get to shape a text physically. But if the physical copies of Austen that we hold teach us about ways to think about her work, we also have to include the changes that we make.

Readership is a difficult thing to trace, physically. If your eyes skim over a sentence in a book instead of reading it fully, there’s no way for a scholar to know that when they study the book a century later. But our readership does leave traces on the books we read: the notes we write in the margins; our finger smudges; coffee spills; wear and tear in the binding.

Annotations left by multiple readers of this copy of The Novels of Jane Austen v. 2 in Yale's Sterling Memorial Library.

Another way we leave traces is through circulation. Library records, like the ones at Sterling Memorial Library, tell a story about who has read books and when. Library bindings change a book: they suit it for years and years of heavy use. A check-out record in the back of a book is also a physical change: each person who has checked it out has left their mark on the book and made a claim on the legacy of Jane Austen.

Copies of Austen's books from the circulating collection rebound in buckram fabric to increase their durability.

When you read a book, or when you write in it, you participate in this process of textual re-imagining. Your book isn’t just an edition. It’s a copy, and it’s a unique retelling of Pride and Prejudice.