This introductory chapter contends that reprints are special sites of interpretation, illumination, and reinvention, and introduces the artists and works that this book will be about. It also uses debates about readership – among authors like F. R. Leavis and Virginia Woolf – and changes in publishing practices—in book clubs, larger print runs, and wood-engraved illustrations – to set the stage for the ways in which the legacy of the nineteenth-century novel was crafted for and by twentieth-century readers.