I’m so fond of the famous “Peacock edition" of Pride and Prejudice that its glorious art nouveau cover--featuring a graceful vase, some extravagant tail feathers, and a bird synonymous with pride--adorns my phone case.
It’s a plus that this edition, first published in 1894, includes the introduction in which the Victorian critic George Saintsbury coined the term “Janeite.”
Still, I’ve never had a hankering to collect the real thing—or, at least, to spend serious money doing so. (First editions of the Peacock P&P can run to five figures; even a modern reprint is pricey, by my lights.) Rare-book collectors are a peculiar breed.
Thus it was that I read with interest a Q&A, published this month, with a young book collector whose area of specialty has an Austenesque dimension.
Elena Ganzevoort, 29, who recently won honorable mention in a contest geared toward young female book collectors, told Fine Books & Collections magazine that she started her collecting career focusing on antique books illustrated by Hugh Thomson. Then she broadened her interests to include a wider range of books in the art nouveau style, especially those with covers featuring thistles or—wait for it—peacocks.
As it happens, the art nouveau Peacock P&P is the first fully illustrated edition of an Austen novel, and Thomson (1860-1920) is the illustrator. Surely this book must be in Gansevoort’s collection?
Alas, the interview doesn’t say, although Gansevoort mentions that she owns four Austen editions and lacks an antique copy of Emma (“my all-time favorite novel”). Accompanying photographs of her collection show only one Austen, a combined Northanger Abbey-Persuasion with Thomson’s illustrations. (It’s the red book on the upper-right-hand shelf, in the first photo.)
Gansevoort’s Austen collection used to be larger: In a harrowing aside, she reports that some of her books “sadly never arrived because they got lost in the mail. The saddest loss was a complete set of Jane Austen’s novels from the 1920s.”
Frankly, a loss like that might have left me suicidal. I guess these young collectors are made of sterner stuff.
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