The Gentle Pastime of Extra-Illustrating Books

Abstract

A pastime that may be puzzling to us today enjoyed great popularity with the gentry of Great Britain and the United States for about a hundred and fifty years, from the mid-eighteenth century to the early twentieth. The idea was to start with a book that interested you. It might be on almost any subject-biography, history, travel, Shakespeare, and the Bible were among the most frequent choices. You gathered works of art on paper (mostly prints, less frequently drawings, and occasionally, after the mid-nineteenth century, photographs) that could serve as appropriate extra illustrations to the text. You mounted the illustrations on sheets uniform in size with the pages of the text; the book was taken out of its binding; the extra-illustrations were interleaved at appropriate places; the whole was rebound, often expanded to several volumes rather than the one or two with which the operation started. If, as often happened, the pages of text were of smaller size than the majority of the illustrations, then the text was remounted on sheets chosen to accommodate the illustrations. There may well have been competition among the practitioners to see who could produce the bulkiest extra-illustrated set of a given book. The extent to which the pastime could be pushed is indicated by a particularly ambitious Bible in the Huntington Library, expanded from three royal octavo volumes to sixty elephant folios by the addition of approximately thirty thousand prints and several hundred drawings of biblical subjects.l Henry E. Huntington, whose book-collecting activities came toward the end of the vogue for extra-illustrating books, and who seems never to have been tempted to try his hand at it, was nevertheless fascinated

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