This would explain the recent success that publishers such as Penguin, Vintage and White's Books have had with producing beautiful hardback editions of classics. Even though such classics are free on an e-reader, readers still want to own the texts because, at some level, they value them enough to want them to have a physical presence in their lives, to exist in a form that can't be erased by the press of a button or replaced onscreen by the next book they read.

In Wuthering Heights, the discovery of Catherine's library, in a state of "dilapidation" and heavily annotated by its owner, draws the reader into the drama of Heathcliff and Cathy: it is as objects, not as texts, that her books tell their troubled history. The lesson of Victorian literature is not, as Price suggests, that the text should trump the book. It is, rather, that we should pay attention to the stories of both.