The Obsession with Extra-Illustrating Books

What happens when loving books takes the form of destruction?

In the 18th and 19th centuries, an obsession spread among bibliophiles for extra-illustrating or grangerizing books. Readers would supplement the pages of an already published book by inserting prints and related materials acquired from other sources. This process would often result in a huge expansion of the original volume, a ballooning that could easily stretch the book to bursting, requiring rebinding into additional volumes to hold the interleaved material. Where did this practice come from? Who thought of doing it in the first place?

In 1769, a country vicar named James Granger (1723–1776) published A Biographical History of England, from Egbert the Great to the Revolution. A guide for collectors of portrait prints, the book cataloged and gave brief descriptions of significant personages in British history as well as directed readers to the most desirable engraved portraits of those subjects for their collections.

Granger’s friend Richard Bull (1721–1805), a member of Parliament and an avid collector, went well beyond using the book to find and procure the recommended prints for his collection. Instead, he dismantled and cut up Granger’s text, placing relevant passages with the corresponding engravings on large backing sheets that served as new pages, and then he bound all these pages together. This process radically altered and expanded the structure and contents of the original book.

Granger’s A Biographical History of England, published as four quarto volumes 9 inches tall, expanded in Bull’s hands to 35 folio volumes with leaves 23 to 28 inches tall, filled with 14,500 portrait prints. What had once been a work free of images—except for Granger’s portrait—became a mixed-media compendium of British historical figures. Today, it is known as the Bull Granger. The Huntington holds all 35 volumes of this first-identified project of extra-illustration, traditionally defined.

Bibliophiles and print collectors soon gave similar treatments to Izaak Walton’s Compleat Angler (1653), Thomas Pennant’s Some Account of London (1791), and James Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791), as well as volumes by Shakespeare. Many readers glued in loose prints, but more adventurous grangerizers, like Bull, disbound their books—physically pulling them apart—and added new blank pages to hold their personally collected prints, which were frequently trimmed or folded to fit inside the book.

To reduce the bulk of an extra-illustrated volume and increase its elegance, some grangerizers cut windows in sheets and inlaid the insertions before rebinding the book. In the process, one book out of an edition of perhaps thousands of identical copies became a unique window into a particular reader’s taste and interpretation of a text.

Grangerizing is thus a balance of destruction and creativity: The binding is removed from the leaves, the leaves are separated from each other, and the volume is eventually turned into something altogether new. For the ardent grangerizer, the book can never be finished. There are always more prints to find and extras to paste in. Why stop? Many readers couldn’t, and commentators began to describe extra-illustration as a kind of serial addiction—a “pestiferous malady,” according to the bibliographer Thomas Frognall Dibdin, writing in 1809.

The Huntington owns another monumental work of extra-illustration, the Kitto Bible, which demonstrates the extreme lengths to which grangerizers would go. What had originally started around 1850 as a three-volume Bible exploded into 60 huge volumes, each weighing as much as 30 pounds apiece, and together containing more than 30,000 prints and other materials. The Kitto Bible is magnificent, but it is also out of control.

The Huntington, as the repository of the Bull Granger, the Kitto Bible, and almost 1,000 other extra-illustrated works—more than any other library—is the ideal host for the conference “Extra Extra! The Material History of the Visually Altered Book,” which will take place on Sept. 27–28 in Haaga Hall. An international group of scholars will explore, across different cultures and media, the practice of remaking, expanding, loving, and destroying books. The altered items to be discussed will include photo books, colonial albums of curious objects, and volumes of plant descriptions with real flowers pressed between the pages.

The conference’s geographical range will extend beyond the British and North American tradition of extra-illustration in the 18th and 19th centuries to include European, Australian, Mexican, and Japanese examples. Participants will also look back at similar practices during the Middle Ages and Renaissance and forward to contemporary artists’ books. What can this long tradition of book modification tell us about the mutable and mixed-media status of the book in the past as well as today?

Read more about the conference and register to attend.

Funding for this conference has been provided by the Zeidberg Lecture in the History of the Book.

Julie Park is the Paterno Family Librarian for Literature and professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. Her most recent book is My Dark Room: Spaces of the Inner Self in Eighteenth-Century England (The University of Chicago Press, 2023).

Adam Smyth is professor of English literature and the history of the book at Balliol College, Oxford University. His most recent book is The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives (Basic Books, 2024).

Please note that the Library items in this story are not on view.