This is a section of the Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts Digital Edition still under development. Over the next months further conservation reports will be added. They are the work of Andrew Honey, Conservator, Bodleian Library, Oxford, and they represent the first attempt to examine and describe in detail the history and condition of each of the manuscripts. The emphasis is on their physical structures as material objects (on paper stock, sewing and bindings, on methods of folding). It is clear from the way she interacted with them that Jane Austen cherished the blank stationer’s notebooks into which she copied her early writings; it is equally clear that in later years she replicated their surfaces in her homemade booklets. As a topic for investigation and report, these writing surfaces form a valuable addition to how we understand her manuscripts, supplementing and expanding our more exclusive concentration on the words alone of the texts inscribed upon them.