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‘Grangerising’ or extra-illustration

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Grangerising or extra-illustration : the insertion of prints and related materials into a book, often resulting in a huge expansion of the physical volume.

In 1769, a country vicar named James Granger published “A Biographical History of England, from Egbert the Great to the Revolution, Consisting of Characters Dispersed in Different Classes, and Adapted to a Methodical Catalogue of Engraved British Heads. Intended as an Essay towards Reducing Our Biography to a System, and a Help to the Knowledge of Portraits”.

Granger’s book had no illustrations. It was a guide for collectors of portrait prints; the book catalogued and gave brief descriptions of significant people in British history and directed readers to the most desirable engraved portraits of those subjects for their collections. The expectation was that readers would find and insert their own images as required. The book was a call for readers to augment the original text to suit themselves.

Granger’s friend the MP and landowner Richard Bull was an avid collector and went well beyond using the book to 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.

Bull was a MP, but never once spoke in Parliament, distracted perhaps by the higher calling of cutting and pasting. Bull inserted so many additions to his copy of Granger’s Biographical History, (originally published as four quarto volumes 9 inches tall), that the original single book turned into 36 large folio volumes with leaves 23 to 28 inches tall, filled with 14,500 portrait prints. It is now held at the Huntington Library in California.

Richard Bull, extra-illustrated copy of ‘A Biographical History of England‘

What began in copies of Granger soon spread to other books; Isaac Walton’s Compleat Angler and James Boswell’s Life of Johnson were regular candidates. Sometimes readers glued in loose prints, while more adventurous Grangerisers unbound their books and added in new blank pages to hold prints, or cut windows in sheets and inlaid insertions into them, before rebinding.

Before the publication of the first edition of Granger’s work in 1769 five shillings was considered a good price by collectors for any English portrait. After the appearance of the Biographical History, books, ornamented with engraved portraits, rose in price to five times their original value, and few could be found unmutilated.

The Sutherland Collection in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford is a spectacular set of extra-illustrated books produced by wealthy merchant Alexander Sutherland and his wife Charlotte, between about 1795 and 1839. The two of them – and Charlotte alone, after her husband’s death – collected prints to extra-illustrate Clarendon’s The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (1702-4) and Burne’s History of My Own Time (1724).

Grangerising gripped them, as it did many bibliophiles in the 18th and 19th centuries and they produced 216 volumes, containing 18,742 prints and drawings, and 14,849 portraits.

Businesses cropped up dedicated to extra-illustration, such as Frederick Strong’s “The Destruction Room,” which opened around 1847. This was advertised as a place “full of interesting Books, or at least when cut up will be so …“

It was not just secular or academic books that were enhanced in this way. The Macklin Bible was described by the book historian G. E. Bentley, Jr. as the most ambitious illustrated Bible ever published in Britain. Devised by the publisher Thomas Macklin, the six-volume Bible had seventy full-page engravings from specially commissioned paintings by English artists with headpiece and tailpiece vignettes for each book of the scriptures.

Macklin’s production proved to be ripe material for extra-illustrators. It may seem surprising for collectors to choose an already substantially illustrated Bible to which to add more illustrations when there was no shortage of editions that would provide a blank slate for their work. However, given that religious art still had a mixed reception in post-Reformation Britain, an already-illustrated Bible may have been considered as sanctioning further extra-illustration. The Macklin Bible was also the finest contemporary printing of the Bible available, and its large, folio format meant that it could easily accommodate plates of various sizes whereas most Bibles were smaller in format, better-suited to regular use.

Robert Bowyer (1758–1834) began his career as a miniature painter, enjoying considerable success in the 1780s, including the patronage of King George III. In the 1790s, he moved into publishing. He was a Baptist, and travelled to Paris with the Baptist Missionary Society. The visit exposed him to the Paris print market, and it seems to have been there that he began to collect biblical prints en masse. By 1826, Bowyer had collected over six thousand scripture pictures, with which he extra-illustrated his copy of the Macklin Bible, extending it to forty-five volumes.

The pasted-in plates are all carefully trimmed, in some cases involving intricate outlines. Any inscriptions that appear outside the main design and some decorative borders are trimmed off. The work of trimming and pasting in the illustrations took two people four years to complete. Bowyer also commissioned a bookcase to house the volumes, which is adorned with relief carvings of biblical scenes and decorative motifs.

The bookcase presents the whole as an object for display, and Bowyer saw the Bible as more than an object for his private enjoyment. He proposed a scheme for the Bible to be purchased for the Bodleian by raising £2,500 in public subscriptions. The Bodleian rejected the proposal and there were insufficient subscriptions. The Bible therefore remained in Bowyer’s hands until his death, when it passed with his business to Mary Parkes, a printseller and publisher who worked with him. In 1843 Parkes had a print produced that depicted the Bible in its bookcase, advertising it for disposal by lottery; it was won by Mr Saxon of Shepton Mallett, Somerset. It then passed through several more hands before being gifted to Bolton Public Libraries in 1948 and it and the bookcase remain intact.

In addition to the Bowyer Bible, at least four other Macklin Bibles were substantially extra-illustrated in the early nineteenth century. A 25-volume copy compiled around 1800–1809 by Elizabeth Bull, daughter of the extra-illustrator Richard Bull. (This work was apparently dismantled in the 1980’s). Even bigger than the Bowyer Bible was the 63-volume copy extra-illustrated by the Manchester bookseller John Gray Bell.

The Huntington Library in California 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.

Extra-illustrated copy of The Holy Bible, with notes and commentary by John Kitto

Another monumental work of extra-illustration, the Kitto Bible, 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 Bristol antiquarian George Weare Braikenridge grangerised his copy of the Biographical History with nearly 4,000 portraits. His main interest, however, was in extra-illustrating his copy of William Barrett’s History and Antiquities of the City of Bristol.

George Weare Braikenridge was born in the colony of Virginia in 1775, to Sarah Jerdone and George Braikenridge, tobacco planter and merchant. Braikenridge was sent to England at an early age and became a wealthy merchant trading with the Caribbean. At the age of 42 he had earned enough money to retire comfortably and devoted the remainder of his life to the pursuit of antiquarianism. He collected everything – art, stained glass, furniture, manuscripts, engravings, printed items, carvings, and much more. In 1823 he bought Broomwell House, Brislington, in which he built himself a library to house his ever-growing collection. Bristol Central Library holds a small portion of his collection.

For his copy of Barrett’s work, Braikenridge collected and commissioned around 1400 drawings and paintings, now held by the Bristol Museum & Art Gallery. Bristol Central Library holds a more diverse portion of his collection, comprising drawings, engravings, prints, newspaper cutting, broadsides, handwritten notes etc. 

Regardless of its popularity, the act of grangerizing was under attack by critics by the 1880s. One critic characterized a grangeriser as a…

Book-Ghoul … who combines the larceny of the biblioklept with the abominable wickedness of breaking up and mutilating the volumes from which he steals.’ Another critic viewed the grangerite as “a sort of literary Attila the Hun or Genghis Khan, who has spread terror and ruin around him.

Grangerizing is a balance of destruction and creativity, the binding is removed, the leaves are separated from each other. Nowadays these are often sold at markets and antiquarian shops, to be framed and hung on the wall. While we may regret the loss of a volume, with grangerising, another volume is eventually turned into something altogether new.

For the ardent grangeriser, the book can never be finished. There are always more prints to find and extras to paste in. Many grangerisers of their day couldn’t stop and commentators began to describe extra-illustration as a kind of addiction—a “pestiferous malady,” according to the bibliographer Thomas Frognall Dibdin, writing in 1809.

According to publisher Holbrook Jackson, writing in The Anatomy of Bibliomania (1930), Grangerising was …

a singularly perverted idea, conceived at a time when there were no book-lovers … a vehement passion, a furious perturbation to be closely observed and radically treated wherever it appears.


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