The Same Books
Being a non-drinking, non-smoking, monogamous bedmaking homeschooler whose idea of a really wild night is listening to a Sue Grafton book on tape (instead of, say, something from that series of recorded lectures on opera) while I wash the dishes, my one vice, other than dark chocolate with truly demonic levels of cacao content, is owning many, many copies of books I love. There are books that I own, and then there are books that own me, and the latter take up a great deal of room in my smallish digs.
When I refer to the books that own me, I mean the ones that I might at any moment need to have at hand, regardless of where I am or what time of day it is. I keep copies of these liberally sprinkled about the place, and tend to take them with me on even the shortest vacation trips, along with all the books I've been planning to dig into whenever a great uninterrupted span of reading time opens before me.
I well remember, and shudder to recall, the trip to Cambria, California that I took one year. I packed something like twenty books (hey, we were going to be gone almost a week), and was there so much as a single copy of Jane Eyre in the lot? There was not. Which is ridiculous. JE is the book that's gotten me through all my most significant travels. Leaving home for good and all at the age of sixteen comes to mind, as does my honeymoon. But like an idiot, I didn't bring it with me on this particular trip, even though the proposal-in-the-garden scene had been nudging at the edges of my mind for days.
So naturally I went through a bad case of withdrawals the second we got there, and after two days of the shakes, realized that I had to buy a copy. I got one second hand, at a used bookstore tacked onto a gas station, and was glad to add it to my collection when we returned home because it was in decent shape and had an introduction I hadn't read before.
So now I own three copies of Jane Eyre. I don't think that's excessive. I have the one I bought for my honeymoon,
which is the beautiful oversized edition with woodcut print illustrations that
I started reading when I wasn't much older than the title heroine when first we
make her acquaintance; and I have my Norton Critical Edition
Although my relationship with JE is longer and deeper than that I have with Pride and Prejudice, I have many more copies of P&P. It's simply fallen out that way. Let me say right now, before I launch my defense of my multiple copies, that I do not own seven copies of the same book. I own seven editions of the same book. Different editions. Does that make it all clear?
Probably not. Even the bookiest of book-people I know consider that I've gone perhaps a bit far in this department. So let me explain myself. Or rather, let me describe their selves, and let that be the only explanation necessary.
My oldest copy of P&P is an Oxford Illustrated Edition. It is not, sadly, the first copy I read. I culled that years ago, and have regretted it ever since. It was worthless in almost every way. It had no introduction to speak of, and was a small creased paperback with some cartoony picture of a woman wearing a bonnet that was probably wildly anachronistic. The baked-mustard color of the rest of the cover gives me a headache even to remember. But it was where I first met Elizabeth and Darcy and all their friends and foes. It cost a dollar seventy-five, which sum (plus tax) I vividly remember giving to the surly owner of the bookstore several blocks down the street. I didn't meet his eye as I handed him the money. He scowled at anyone under the age of twenty who darkened his doorstep, and making purchases didn't soften him up any.
P&P was one of the first "real" books I ever bought -- Austen has been compared to Shakespeare, and funnily enough I started buying and reading him in a halting fashion at about the same time, when I was around twelve. The bookstore closed when the chains started opening (or closing in), and though the owner unnerved me, I missed the place and felt vaguely guilty for not having bought more books there.
As I was saying. My oldest copy of P&P is a blue-flowered Oxford Illustrated edition. I got it, along with all of Austen's other works, from one of those book clubs by mail where they swear you'll never have to make another purchase, ever, ever, if you'll only grant them the huge favor of buying seventeen books for fifty cents or whatever the rate is. The set, all six volumes, counted as a single title, thereby reinforcing the unfortunate stereotype that those who enjoy the humanities are incapable of even the simplest mathematical equations.
Anyone who has experienced the richness of the Norton
Critical Editions will understand immediately why I purchased their P&P
Which is why I own two Norton Critical
Editions of P&P, because since I bought my first one they have come
out with a newer, updated version
That is, even I'll agree, quite enough P&P
for one person. Unless that person
doesn't own a dishwasher and gets some of her best reading done over the suds a
la book on tape, and that selfsame person gets tired of never finding just the
taped titles she wants just when she wants them at the library, especially
since our library (I don't know if yours is like this) has an annoying habit of
closing every night, and not opening at all some days. (Priorities, much?) So of course I had to purchase a copy of P&P on tape
And that would really be enough, even for me. Except that one beautiful day, I looked at
all my copies of P&P and realized that I wanted to read just the
book
And that would really be enough. And it was.
Except that my local library has a small ongoing book sale going on, and
one afternoon I found a copy of the Scholastic edition of P&P
Of course not. And so I shelled out another fifty cents at
the same library on a different day when the Signet Classic edition of P&P
And that brings us up to seven, and I hope you now understand how a perfectly sane person could just happen to have that many copies of Pride and Prejudice littering her own particular landscape, and why she has no plans for getting rid of any of them. This is not a static number, by the way. Further bulletins as events warrant.
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