While working this summer in London as a Georgian Papers Programme Fellow at the Royal Archives in Windsor Castle, our own Nick Foretek discovered the earliest known documented purchase of a Jane Austen novel. The surprise: the purchaser was the Prince Regent, the future King George IV, a man known more for his debauchery than for his taste in reading (see below), and perhaps more significant, a man despised by Austen herself.
You can read all about it in the attached press release from the Royal Archives or in today’s New York Times:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/24/books/jane-austen-prince-regent.html