You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles
YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.
Wolfson’s book, therefore, is a curious hybrid: with its illustrations coming from a<br />
quite different book, it may be described as ‘extra-illustrated’. This practice, which<br />
became known as ‘Grangerizing’, flourished in the UK and USA from about 1750<br />
till the early 1900s, and has been described as the pre-digital era equivalent of<br />
‘cut and paste’, since it involves adding to books illustrations collected from other<br />
sources – including other books. It is called after an early advocate, the Revd James<br />
Granger, whose own four-volume Biographical History of England … adapted to a<br />
Methodological Catalogue of Engraved British Heads (1769) included an enormous<br />
checklist of portrait engravings; the idea was that readers should collect the images<br />
listed of ‘engraved heads’, and stick them into their own copy. The first edition even<br />
included (apparently deliberately) blank pages for the purpose. Grangerization<br />
became a popular Victorian parlour activity, and the market for suitable prints<br />
expanded greatly.<br />
In this way, the concept of the book as a static, fixed object – insofar as it had ever<br />
actually been that – was changing: the book was now something that could be<br />
turned into a kind of personal display cabinet, with Shakespeare and the Bible being<br />
popular targets.<br />
‘Like Victorian ottomans and Victorian curiosity cabinets, Victorian Bibles<br />
tend to be overstuffed: with illustrations of the flora and fauna of the Middle<br />
East; with drawings of the ancient pottery and farming implements of the<br />
Mediterranean; with reproductions of well-known, if not always well-executed,<br />
art; with … learned … notes citing the work of 19th century archaeologists,<br />
biblical commentators, and historians …’ (L.A. Ferrell, The Bible and the People,<br />
Yale, 2008; p. 173).<br />
The British Library has its own extra-illustrated copy of the Vitré 1662 Bible,<br />
but instead of our Physica Sacra illustrations, it incorporates extracts from many<br />
different biblical works as well as numerous maps. An extreme example is the<br />
Huntingdon Library’s ‘Kitto Bible’, consisting of the Authorised Version with<br />
footnotes by John Kitto (1800-54) which was Grangerized by one James Gibbs until<br />
it reached gargantuan proportions, more than sixty volumes. According to Ferrell<br />
again (p. 177), more than 30,000 prints, engravings and drawings were added, as<br />
well as hundreds of leaves from other printed Bibles, and the illustrations represent<br />
113
Change language