This summer’s exhibition at the Huntington (running until 28th October) reveals more than 40 intriguing examples of extra-illustrated books from the Library’s collection. Ranging from the late 1700s to the early 1900s, these ‘Grangerised’ volumes (named after James Granger, the eighteenth-century biographer and print collector, and a notable extra-illustrator) expose a fashion for customising printed books with the addition of prints, manuscripts, and other paper materials. One of the stars of the exhibition is a part (containing Romans and 1 Corinthians) of the mid-nineteenth-century Kitto Bible, ‘probably the largest Bible in the world’: originating as a very ordinary two-volume Bible, it now consists of an astonishing sixty individual books. Canonical works appear to have been particular favourites for Grangerisers – impressively expanded editions of Shakespeare and Virgil both feature here, too.
The delicate process of extra-illustration involved taking a book apart at the binding, cutting frames within its pages, pasting additional sheets into these frames, and then re-binding the sheets, which helped to reduce the problem of the volume becoming too awkwardly voluminous. The exhibition’s curators have even made a short film demonstration (http://vimeo.com/65673921) – although they reassure viewers that no eighteenth-century prints were harmed in the experiment. This sense of apprehension towards extra-illustration and the cutting and altering it involved comes across very strongly in the exhibition commentaries, which is not surprising, coming as they do from a curator of rare books. The Huntington has more than a thousand extra-illustrated books in its holdings, and while they are often incredibly striking to the casual viewer, they present all kinds of bibliographical and curatorial tangles for those who look after them. How do you catalogue a book that contains material from many different sources, none of which is necessarily contemporaneous with the original printed volume? How do you catalogue an engraving that would normally be found in an art collection, but which has been pasted into a book with lots of other prints, each from a different source? These ‘illuminated palaces’ have a complicated reception history (they were not short of critics in their heyday), and they continue to challenge our definition of ‘the book’ today.