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Extra-illustration, preservation and libraries in the nineteenth-century United States
- Source: Journal of Illustration, Volume 8, Issue The Unique Copy: (Extra-)Illustration, Word and Image, Book History, and Print Culture, Aug 2021, p. 81 - 105
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- 22 May 2019
- 15 Jun 2020
- 01 Aug 2021
Abstract
Extra-illustration, usually considered an eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century British phenomenon, is abundantly present in the creative book practices of the late nineteenth-century United States, but it is often overlooked in scholarship. Analysing the collecting, cutting and pasting habits of Massachusetts banker Nathaniel Paine, this article argues that extra-illustration was closely connected to the then emerging modes of information organization that have since shaped modern libraries. Paine added hundreds of mass-produced images of US president George Washington to the volumes in his library, including a group of pamphlets printed just after Washington died in 1799. This unusual group of pamphlets, as well as Paine’s other extra-illustrative supplements to his volumes and scrapbooks, reveal an effort not only to preserve a particular version of the past but also to develop an indexing scheme built around pictures.