I couldn’t tell you how many Jane Austen books I have, but I’m guessing about 25. Not many of them are Northanger Abbey, but there are bound to be a few of even that lying around. They are bought mainly for the different introductions - how luxurious it is to have others’ interpretations of your favourite books.

Copies of Persuasion are stockpiled for an entirely different reason – within me burns a missionary’s zeal for spreading the Austen love. Anyone who admits to not having read it can immediately be given a copy, told not to worry about giving it back, but that I won’t be acknowledging their existence until they’ve read (and appreciated) the book. That, of course, is a slight exaggeration. Slight.

The main reason, however, that I buy the same books over and over is for a new cover.

Of course, it isn’t something that I do every-time I see a new cover - could you imagine?! But for some authors, there are so many different versions, which are so evocative of a time – when the book was published, or when the story was set - that I can’t help but pay those couple of pounds for a book I don’t really need to read again.

My own favourites are Mary Stewart and Agatha Christie. Often the cover is a dazzling Technicolor affair, showing a beautiful young lady in some sort of distress, or in the case of Agatha Christie, the delightfully rotund figure of Hercule Poirot in a variety of poses.

  

I have a personal fear, knowing the attraction of a different cover, that the publishing industry will go the way of TV and film, enticing fans to buy another new edition each time the author has made some minute change, or included bonus material – I’m not sure that my bank balance would be in good shape!

[Emma Dalby-Bowler works at Pan Macmillan]