Journal of Illustration - The Unique Copy: (Extra-)Illustration, Word and Image, Book History, and Print Culture, Aug 2021

This article examines an iconic example of grangerizing: the Macklin Bible extra-illustrated in 45 volumes by London artist and bookseller Robert Bowyer (1758–1834) in the first quarter of the nineteenth century (Bolton Libraries and Museums, Bolton, United Kingdom). The principal focus is on the Bowyer Bible as an example of an extra-illustrator’s close engagement with its source publication. The author argues that Bowyer’s practice responds not only to the Bible or the King James Bible, in general, but also to the Macklin Bible, in particular. The article discusses how the Bowyer Bible engages with the Macklin Bible specifically and how it reflects a broader range of concerns in its visual engagement with the Bible. It demonstrates that Bowyer’s curation of biblical visual material evidences both his professional interests as a connoisseur of prints and his personal interests in the visual culture of the Bible that reflect his own piety as well as contemporaneous developments in the study of the scriptures. Other matters discussed in the article are the original function of this Bible, as well as the extent to which it reflects and is distinctive from contemporaneous extra-illustrated books.

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.

This article is a case study of photographs as extra-illustrations using as an example the third volume in the series of Maple Leaves books by Sir James MacPherson LeMoine (1825–1912), published in 1865 under the subtitle Canadian History and Quebec Scenery, which was the first literary work in Canada to be commercially illustrated with photographs. Original albumen photographs made by photographer Jules-Isaïe Benoît dit Livernois (1830–65) depicted many of the country villas described by the author in the section referred to as ‘Our Country Seats’. The readers of Maple Leaves turned this work into a complex and intimate record of a community by liberally augmenting the official photographs with individual prints selected independently for their copies. The surviving books collectively serve as a kind of regional album, preserving the tastes and aspirations of some of the 500 subscribers living in and around Quebec City in the mid-nineteenth century.