Reading literature in the library

I was looking at some new titles recently on a certain well known book website, and was fascinated by the plethora of titles such as "Reading Lolita in Tehran" and "Talking about Jane Austen in Baghdad" to name but two. Many missionary book lovers seem to be eager to fly to various war zones or similarly troubled areas with nothing but "Sense and Sensibility" and a smattering of the local lingo to see them through. And good for them - the more people who read the better, and good literature should reach across all boundaries.
I can't help but wonder, however, if we are neglecting our own readers at home as we evangelise our literature abroad. As an experiment I looked through our classics section - we have two copies of "Pride and Prejudice" neither of which has been out for six months. "Middlemarch" hasn't been out for over a year. The only Thomas Hardy to be issued recently was the one on the telly. Same goes for Dickens. Some of the older staff here reminisce fondly about a full set of Proust that is now hidden away in a stack somewhere. Our Forsters are tatty and our Brontes are battered. It seems a shame that just as readers in Afghanistan embrace our Emily, we are forgetting about her altogether.
I also despair when students come in for either the new-fangled graphic versions of various classics and set texts, or failing that the York notes. The graphic ones have about a quarter of the text, and are beefed up with gangland style pictures of hard looking youths and mean looking grown ups with a sexy Juliet and a languishing Romeo, in the case of Shakespeare. York notes have their place - I was a student after all, but students these days seem to order them instead of the text itself.
So next time your literary feet start to itch, how about Brontes in Birmingham, Proust in Pontefract, or Austen in Ambleside. You don't need to cross oceans to promote good writing.