A genuinely original work, The Art of the Reprint establishes the reprint as a vital area of study. In tightly curated encounters between extraordinary twentieth-century artists and beloved nineteenth-century novels, Clare Leighton travels to Dorset to minutely observe Thomas Hardy's landscape for a 1929 The Return of the Native (1878); Rockwell Kent channels his many sea journeys into a 1930 Moby Dick (1851); Fritz Eichenberg transposes the churn and isolation of fleeing Nazi Germany onto Expressionistic engravings for Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847); and Joan Hassall elucidates a bright social world at miniature scale for a 1975 set of The Complete Novels of Jane Austen (1787-1817). Mediators between text and book and author and reader, these artists interpreted these novels and then illustrated their interpretations, stunningly and strangely, in wood, ink, and paper, for everyday readers.

'Parry reminds is that many readers in the early decades of the twentieth century had different expectations. The illustrators she discusses had deeply personal relations with the books they worked on … [Parry] pays these illustrators the tribute of discussing their works as art.'

Dinah Birch Source: Times Literary Supplement