Event

Extra Extra! The Material History of the Visually Altered Book

Join scholars in the field as they discuss extra-illustration, a historical word and image practice in which readers altered their books by adding their own visual elements to them. A book is thus physically expanded—sometimes dramatically so—and fundamental categories of book, art, and object become destabilized.
Conferences

As it considers extra-illustration’s flowering in late 18th- and early 19th-century England, this conference will also move back and forward in time and will venture well beyond a traditional Anglo American paradigm (through Europe, Australia, Mexico, and Japan). Working with an expansive definition of this long-standing but highly mutable practice, examples will range from modified medieval manuscripts to contemporary artists’ books and botanical books with ephemeral plants pressed inside their pages.

Funding provided by the Zeidberg Lecture in the History of the Book.

Learn more about academic conferences and lectures at The Huntington

Conference Schedule

Friday, Sept. 27

8:30 a.m. | Registration and Coffee

9 a.m. | Welcome

  • Susan Juster (The Huntington), Julie Park (Penn State University), and Adam Smyth (Balliol College, Oxford University)

9:15 a.m. | Session 1: Reframe/Remake

  • Moderator: Julie Park (Penn State University)
  • Luisa Calè (Birkbeck College, University of London)
    “William Blake In and Out of Gibbs’ Kitto Bible: Ways of Seeing the Conversion of Paul”
  • Carolin Gluchowski (Oxford University)
    “Illuminating the Void: The Intricate Interplay of Added Illuminations in the Bodleian Library’s Manuscript Ms. e. Mus. 160”

10:45 a.m. | Break

11 a.m. | Session 2: Place/Moment

  • Moderator: Luisa Calè (Birkbeck College, University of London)
  • Julie Park (Penn State University)
    “Extra-Illustrated Manuscript as Memory Palace: Archiving the House of the Walpoles”
  • Adam Smyth (Balliol College, Oxford University)
    “Extra-Illustration in England: 1650, 1777, 2013”

12:30 p.m. | Lunch

1:30 p.m. | Session 3: Dialogue/Discord

  • Moderator: Karla Nielsen (The Huntington)
  • Jeanne Britton (University of South Carolina)
    “The Letter as Image: Illustrating the 18th-Century Correspondence of Ignatius Sancho with Laurence Sterne”
  • Nicole Reynolds (Ohio University)
    “‘This Bomb Under My Monument’: Extra-Illustration and the War Books Controversy – Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves”

3:30 p.m. | Study Session (speakers only)

Saturday, Sept. 28

9:30 a.m. | Registration and Coffee

10 a.m. | Session 4: Gather/Scatter

  • Moderator: Adam Smyth (Balliol College, Oxford University)
  • Molly Duggins (National Art School, Sydney)
    “Cut-and-Paste Cabinet: Major James Wallis’ 1840s Album of Colonial New South Wales”
  • Anna Svensson (Uppsala University)
    “A Thistle or a Rose? Probing the Thorny Question of Pressed Plants in Printed Books from the 16th to the 20th Centuries”
  • Tony White (SUNY Purchase)
    “Frisson and Serendipity: Loose Leaves on the Loose in International Artists’ Books”

Noon | Lunch

1 p.m. | Session 5: Business/Leisure

  • Moderator: Stephen Tabor (The Huntington)
  • Travis McDade (University of Illinois College of Law)
    “Humorous Phases of the Law: Irving Browne’s Extra-Illustrated Life in 19th-Century America”
  • Whitney Trettien (University of Pennsylvania)
    “The Calculated Risk of Book Destruction: Book Collecting and Calculating Technologies in 19th-Century America”

3 p.m. | Break

3:15 p.m. | Closing Remarks

  • Julie Park and Adam Smyth

For questions about this event, please contact researchconference@huntington.org or 626-405-3432

An open book with layers of papers on the same page, including an illustration and printed and handwritten text.

Richard Bull’s copy of A collection of the loose pieces printed at Strawberry-Hill, approximately 1750–1801. | The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.