Booknote: Jane Austen: Cover to Cover

Margaret C. Sullivan, Jane Austen Cover to Cover: 200 Years of Classic Covers. Philadelphia, PA: Quirk Books, 2014. ISBN: 9781594747250.

Genre: nonfiction
Subgenre: books, publishing, book trade, art, Jane Austen
Format: coffee table art book
Source: Contest win at BookLikes.

This art/coffee table book is a collection of book covers of Jane Austen novels plus some of the minor works which get collected here and there, often attached to a novel or omnibus edition.

In terms of aesthetics, this is a very nice book from the cover to the inside the cover to the overall layout. It really looks nice, and Austen fans will likely enjoy it.

The book is arranged as follows:

• Introduction.
• Six chapters. Each chapter has a short introduction to the time period it covers. Then you get the covers and text with history and information on the cover, the publishers, and even information on book making and the book trade.
• An appendix. This includes some material on collecting Austen novels. 
• A bibliography. 
• Acknowledgments and a note from the author. 

On the positive, for Austen fans this book will be a delight. The author put in serious work to find every book cover and edition out there of Austen works from the 1800s to today. The editions even include film edition/tie-ins and foreign language editions. In addition, this is a good look at the book trade business over time, specially as it concerns the publishers who've have and sold Austen's works over time. You get a lot of material in 200 pages or so.

On the not so positive,  this is basically all Jane Austen, all the time. She only wrote a few works, so you are basically seeing the same books all the time, just different covers. For serious Austen fans, this is great. For casual readers, it can get tiring halfway through the book. It can feel like you are seeing the same thing over and over, and while the history can be interesting, again, for non-Austen fans this can be a bit of overload.

Bottom line. Highly recommended for Jane Austen fans. This may be a must for them. For public libraries, this may be a good option, specially if their Austens are popular. For casual readers, this is definitely optional. It may appeal to readers who like books about books a bit. It is optional for academic libraries; it may be good for academic libraries with strong book history, publishing interests, and if there are strong Jane Austen courses, this book may be of interest too.

In the end, I liked it, but it is not something I would add to my personal collection. I'd say unless you are a hardcore Jane Austen fan, borrow it.

3 out of 5 stars.