Conference | Extra Extra! The Visually Altered Book
This weekend at The Huntington . . . with more information at this Huntington blog posting by Park and Smyth:
Extra Extra! The Material History of the Visually Altered Book
The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, 27–28 September 2024
Organized by Julie Park and Adam Smyth
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).
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. 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.
For questions about this event, please contact researchconference@huntington.org.
Funding provided by the Zeidberg Lecture in the History of the Book.
f r i d a y , 2 7 s e p t e m b e r
8.30am Registration and coffee
9.00 Welcome
• Susan Juster (The Huntington), Julie Park (Penn State University), and Adam Smyth (Balliol College, Oxford University)
9.15 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 Break
11.00 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 Lunch
1.30 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 Study Session (for speakers only)
s a t u r d a y , 2 8 s e p t e m b e r
9.30am Registration and coffee
10.00 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
12.00 Lunch
1.00 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
3.00 Break
3.15 Closing remarks by Julie Park and Adam Smyth
Exhibition | Paris, 1793–1794
Opening at the Musée Carnavalet:
Paris, 1793–1794: A Revolutionary Year
Musée Carnavalet, Paris, 16 October 2024 — 16 February 2025
Musée de la Révolution française, Vizille, 27 June — 23 November 2025
Curated by Valérie Guillaume, Philippe Charnotet, and Anne Zazzo
For the first time, the Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris, renowned for its collections on the French Revolution, will single out one key year in the revolution—without a doubt the most complex: ‘Year II’ of the Republican calendar, covering the period from 22 September 1793 to 21 September 1794.
1789, the year of the Storming of the Bastille and The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, is often considered to be the glorious year of the Revolution and even to embody the French Revolution in its entirety. It is the year during which Paris established itself as the capital of the Enlightenment and Revolutions. But compared to the clarity of ’89’, ’93’ appears much darker and thornier. As it was just coming to an end, this long political year spanning from the spring of 1793 to the summer of 1794 had already found a name: the ‘Terror’. Fabricated for political reasons, the word points to the authoritarian transition that the republican regime had undergone. And yet, the years 1793–94 are also the years that some, confident in their ability to reinvent history, called ‘Year II’: a year defined by its breaking with the past and its revitalising of revolutionary utopias. The exhibition is a collection of more than 250 works of all kinds: paintings, sculptures, objects of decorative arts, historical and memorial objects, wallpaper, posters, pieces of furniture… And all translate collective histories and incredible individual fates. These varied objects reveal a context imbued with collective fears and state violence, but also with extraordinary daily activities, feasts, and celebrations.
Paris, 1793–1794: Une année révolutionnaire (Paris Musées, 2024), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-2759605903, €39.
Scientific commission
• Valérie Guillaume, director of the Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris
• Philippe Charnotet, assistant curator and head of the numismatic collection at the Musée Carnavalet
• Anne Zazzo, chief curator, head of the historical and memorial objects collection at the Musée Carnavalet
Scientific committee
• Jean-Clément Martin, professor emeritus of History of the French Revolution at the University Paris I
– Panthéon-Sorbonne
• Alain Chevalier, director of the Musée de la Révolution Française – Domaine de Vizille
• Aurélien Larné, archivist at the Ministry of Justice – Department of the Archives, Documentation and Cultural Heritage
• Marisa Linton, professor of Modern History at the University of Kingston – London
• Guillaume Mazeau, senior lecturer of Modern History at the Université Paris I – Panthéon-Sorbonne
• Allan Potofsky, professor of Modern History at the Université Paris-Cité
• Charles Eloi Vial, curator of the Libraries for the Department of Manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France
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Note (added 7 July 2025)— The posting was updated to include the second venue, the Musée de la Révolution française, where the exhibition is titled 1793–1794: Un Tourbillon Révolutionnaire.
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