Links and love: Cool stuff around the Jane Austen internet

So much cool Jane stuff going on around this here internet! Enjoy, beloved sisters. And robots. (There are probably robots reading this, I’ve decided.)

– Didja hear? PD James’s Austen mystery novel, Death Comes to Pemberley, comes out December 6 in the U.S.; it’s already out in the U.K. A lady can do what she wants when she’s 90, you know?

– Didja know? There’s band called The Jane Austen Argument.

– An interview with delightful fellow blogger—and all-around nice person—Laurel Ann Nattress, of Austenprose and the anthology Jane Austen Made Me Do It.

– Check out this cool embroidery pattern, based on a letter Jane wrote to her brother, Frank! In other, unrelated news, it’s only 45 days until Christmas.

– This is just a really confusing image, especially if you think it’s the cover of a purportedly Regency-era romance where Kate Formerly Middleton wears a cowboy hat. You know, hypothetically. (Heh, you’re going to click now, right? You can’t not click after that gorgeous description.)

Keep calm and Jane on, everybody.

Emma, in stitches

Literary aesthetes/crafty nerds, take heart! Penguin Classics, ever popular for their artsy, modern designs, is taking things even further this fall: hand-sewn covers for Emma, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, and Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty! Or, at least, the originals were hand-sewn—the mass-produced versions will use sculpted emboss, which (according to the Google machine and my limited understanding of non-standard cover design; Miss Osborne could doubtless fill in the gaps) is a non-thread, non-manual-labor sort of endeavor. Which, hey, might be okay, considering the thorny issues surrounding who exactly would be doing the embroidery of thousands of ostensibly non-exorbitantly-priced mass-market books. In any case, the covers were created by artist Jillian Tamaki (check out process photos here), who apparently said that she would not be taking commissions for embroidery work unless Penguin Classics invited her to embroider their books. Which just makes me want to say, Hey, I will never write for television unless it’s for whatever Bryan Fuller‘s doing next! Nor will I ever take a writing job on the internet unless it’s for Go Fug Yourself! And I certainly won’t write for print unless it’s for The New Yorker. OBVIOUSLY.

Sooooo, I’ll just be over here, waiting for the phone to ring. Yup, aaaaany second now.

Via The Atlantic.