Call for Papers | The Unique Copy: Extra-Illustration
First page of text in an illustrated edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1908 (Folger Digital Image 81266), exhibited in the Folger’s 2010 exhibition Extending the Book: the Art of Extra-Illustration.
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From the Call for Papers:
The Unique Copy: Extra-Illustration, Word and Image, and Print Culture
Herzog August Library, Wolfenbüttel, Germany, 24–25 May 2018
Proposals due by 30 May 2017
Organized by Christina Ionescu and Sandro Jung
Is extra-illustration an ornamental art or does it add layers of significance and nuance to the accompanying text? How does it shed light on authorship, the act of reading, book history, and print culture? How does text-image interaction manifest itself in the extra-illustrated book-object? Is extra-illustration the equivalent of grangerising or are there other means of materially expanding the text? Is it a creative act or a form of customised reproduction or reuse of print matter? Who are the artists, readers, collectors, publishers, and curators who are responsible for the creation of extra-illustrated objects?
In his study of the history, symptoms, and cure of a fatal disease caused by the unrestrained desire to possess printed works, Thomas Frognall Dibdin (1776–1847) observes that “[a] passion for a book which has any peculiarity about it,” as a result of grangerising by means of collected prints, transcriptions, or various cutouts, “or which is remarkable for its size, beauty, and condition—is indicative of a rage for unique copies, and is unquestionably a strong prevailing symptom of the Bibliomania.” Extra-illustration as a practice did not emerge during bibliomaniac Dibdin’s birth century, which witnessed the publication of James Granger’s Biographical History of England (1769) and a widespread rage for unique copies of books, nor has it been extinguished in our digital era by modern technology. Whether it manifests materially as a published work that is supplemented verbally (with interleaved or pasted autograph letters, handwritten notes, or print matter either directly or tangentially linked to its content), or visually (with additional drawings, prints, maps, watercolours, photographs, or other forms of artwork that are similarly connected to a variable degree of closeness to the text), an extra-illustrated copy is important not only for its uniqueness as an original artefact and its commercial value as a desired commodity. As emblematic of an artistic, bibliographic, and cultural practice, it sheds light on its creator, the context of its production, and the reception of a text. As a form of personalised book design, it is moreover significant as a means of creative expression, an outlet of reader empowerment, and an archival repository of historical or cultural insight. Some of the popular targets of extra-illustration through time have been the Bible, biographies, historical treatises, topographical surveys, travel narratives, and popular plays.
A plethora of monographs and special journal issues dealing with book illustration from various theoretical and (inter)disciplinary perspectives have been published in recent years, but the subfield of extra-illustration remains largely unstudied. It is important to note, however, the contribution to the field by Luisa Calè, Lucy Peltz, and Stuart Sillars, who have proposed useful in-depth reflections on extra-illustration and grangerising as a practice. To address this gap in current scholarship, we invite papers that engage with extra-illustration through the conceptual lenses of book history, print and visual culture studies, and word and image theory. Contributions that focus on original artwork contained in extra-illustrated copies from the perspective of word and image studies are of particular interest to the co-editors, as are studies of extra-illustration as a link between text, book-object, and context, as approached through the prism of the book arts and reception theory. Other possibilities include contributions investigating extra-illustration diachronically or cross-culturally, and case studies dealing with a special copy, a collection of extra-illustrated books, or an individual collector, publisher, curator, or artist responsible for the creation of such unique artefacts.
Possible themes include but are not limited to:
· grangerising as a biblio-cultural practice
· grangerising as a form of material repurposing in relation to print culture
· grangerising as a fashionable and biblioclastic pastime
· grangerising as an act of authorship
· the Grangerite, bookscrapping, and collecting practices
· illustrative responses to the text in the form of unique infra-textual images
· marginal illustration and text-image interaction
· extra-illustration as interactive and engaged reading
· extra-illustration as emblematic of institutional/curatorial collecting practices
· extra-illustration as personalised book design
· extra-illustration as a window into history and intellectual thought
· extra-illustration as a book customisation response to mass production
· digital imports of extra-illustration as a means of expression
500-word abstracts, along with the author’s contact information and bio-bibliographical note, should be sent to the co-editors (cionescu@mta.ca / prof.s.jung@gmail.com) by 30 May 2017. A publication on the topic, either a journal issue or a collection of essays, is envisaged.
New Book | Facing the Text: Extra-illustration
Distributed by Manchester University Press:
Lucy Peltz, Facing the Text: Extra-illustration, Print Culture, and Society in Britain, 1769–1840 (San Marino, Huntington Library Press, 2017), 424 pages, ISBN: 978 08732 82611, $150 / £115.
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 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. In this book, Lucy Peltz maps a history of extra-illustration and its social and cultural meanings, providing a fascinating account of the practice itself and the often colourful personalities who engaged in it. The remarkable contents of key extra-illustrated books are explored, along with the broader historical and commercial contexts in which they were produced and enjoyed.
Lucy Peltz is Senior Curator of Eighteenth-Century Collections and Head of Collections Displays (Tudor to Regency) at the National Portrait Gallery, London.
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C O N T E N T S
Introduction: A Long History of Extra-Illustration
Part I: Getting Your Heads in Order: Engraved Portrait Collecting and the Origins of Extra-Illustration
1 ‘Of Collectors of English Portrait Prints’
2 Genteel Authorship, the Community of the Antiquarian Text, and the Invention of Extra-Illustration
3 Portraiture, Order, and Meaning
4 John, Lord Mountstuart and the Ends of the Bull Granger
Part II: From Domestic Retirement to a Commercial Marketplace: Amateurs, Antiquaries, and Entrepreneurs
5 ‘Retirement, Rural Quiet, Friendship, Books’: Amateurism and Its Trophies
6 Charting the Craze: Anthony Storer and Richard Bull
7 The Strawberry Hill Press and the Rituals of Bibliographic Exchange
8 Antiquarian Topography or Armchair Tourism: Thomas Pennant’s “Labors”
9 Popularizing Pennant’s London: How the Art World Sold Extra-Illustration
Part III: The Sutherland Clarendon: Gender, the Print Market, and National Heritage
10 ‘Buried under Its Own Grandeur’: Understanding the Sutherland Clarendon
12 The Cut and Thrust of the Print Market in the Early Nineteenth Century
13 Women, Widowhood, and Collecting: Charlotte Sutherland’s Inheritance
14 Monumentalizing the Sutherland Clarendon: Between Rhetoric and Content, 1820–1839
15 The Female Connoisseur and the Private Catalogue
16 A ‘National Work’ Completed: The Sutherland Clarendon and Cultural Heritage
Epilogue: Rethinking the Past, Securing the Future
Select Bibliography
Index
Postdoctoral Research Assistant: Enlightenment Architectures
From the position description:
Postdoctoral Research Assistant: Enlightenment Architectures
The British Museum, London, 28 months, starting May 2017
Applications due by 13 March 2017
An exciting opportunity has arisen at the British Museum for a Postdoctoral Research Assistant to contribute to the Leverhulme Trust funded research project Enlightenment Architectures: Sir Hans Sloane’s catalogues of his collections under the Principal Investigator, Kim Sloan and Co-Investigator Julianne Nyhan (UCL).
Beginning ideally in May 2017, as part of this project, the post-holder will work alongside another Postdoctoral Research Assistant on the process of digitally encoding externally sourced transcriptions of six of Sir Hans Sloane’s manuscript catalogues and will assist with identifying information entities within them which will inform research. You will also participate in the production of the project’s peer-reviewed research publications, planned to be a minimum of four co-authored interdisciplinary articles which will be published by the end of the project.
The successful candidate will have completed a PhD, or equivalent, and will be proficient in Latin and/or at least one modern language related to the project. With experience of research/teaching/curatorial work, you will have strong knowledge of electronic text, particularly digital cultural heritage resources for the 17th and 18th centuries.
More information is available here»
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