Despite her short life, the British writer Jane Austen (1775-1817) left a “lasting” legacy upon her death that the Grolier Club, a society of bibliophiles in New York, will explore in detail until February. Hidden on a corner of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the Grolier Club is on display until Valentine’s Day more than 100 books, posters, letters and essays related to Austen, who would celebrate her 250th birthday this Wednesday the 17th.
The exhibition is divided into five periods of 50 years each, during which the public investigates the ins and outs of Austen’s literature and the perception of it by her fans. In this way, Paper Jane: 250 years of Austen works like a kaleidoscopea gadget where when you turn it you see a different thing every time.
“We tried to show the most important aspects of Jane Austen at each moment and how her readers perceived her,” says Mary Crawford, one of the exhibition’s curators, who shares a first and last name with EFE.The popular character of Mansfield Parknovel by the author. A love letter to Jane born from private collections The exhibition also functions as a love letter to Austen written by the curators, since the objects on display behind the glass and shelves belong to their own collections.
And Crawford, Sandra Clark and Janine Barchas, all members of the Grolier Club, have been at least four decades of acquiring all kinds of Austen itemswhich they sometimes acquire in the most unexpected places. This is the case of a copy of the first edition of Pride and prejudice which was published in America, a “pirated” book which copied the third edition of the work published in London and which is also the most valuable object in the exhibition.
Clark tells EFE that he spent years looking for this item, a seemingly impossible search that ended when he found it on Amazon, because the original owners had forgotten it in their house and, after selling it, its new buyers decided to put it up for sale. For Crawford, one of the pieces that stood out the most to him was the second edition of Senses and sensitivitywhich he finally found by surprise on the floor of a bookstore in Tempe (Arizona): “No one knew what it was,” he says with a laugh.
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