Extending the Book: The Art of Extra-Illustration

Extending the Book introduces the largely-forgotten art of extra-illustration – individually adding portraits or other illustrations to published books – and explores what this personalized form of book design reveals about the history of reading.

It includes a brief introduction to the concept of designing and creating a unique book by adding external material and an overview of the phenomenon’s history and its heyday in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The works of Shakespeare – the most popular single author for extra-illustration – exemplify the practice as it changed over time.

From the beginning, extra-illustrators had to defend the exquisite handicraft (in the words of an 1890 proponent) against accusations of breaking up a good book to illustrate a worse one (in the words of an 1892 critic). This book examines the art and the practice of extra-illustration, from crudely altered books to beautiful new creations.