A rich history of the nineteenth-century novel as it was re-imagined for everyday readers by extraordinary twentieth-century illustrators.

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.