Facing the Text

Lucy Peltz explores the practice of extra-illustration in relation to the popularization of antiquarianism, the commercialization of print culture, the reception of engraved portraiture, and the rise of the amateur, the collector, and the connoisseur. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, thousands of books were customized with prints and drawings in a practice called extra-illustration. These books were often massively extended, lavishly bound, and prized by their owners as objects of display, status, and exchange. The scale of these compilations as well as their interdisciplinary nature -- at once literary texts, printed books, art collections, and indexes of visual culture -- have typically excluded them from histories of art and literature.