Extra-illustration

Extra-illustration or grangerisation is the process whereby texts, normally in their published state, are customized by the incorporation of thematically linked prints, watercolors, and other visual materials.

As the pastime became more popular, the genre became more diverse but the scope remained the same: places and people, chronicles of contemporary life, the lives of artistic and theatrical celebrities, and a variety of then-modern writers, notably Byron and Dickens.

In the British Museum, a particularly impressive and early example is the copy of Some Account of London by Thomas Pennant, extra-illustrated by John Charles Crowle.

[7] Perhaps the largest project in the genre are the extra-illustrated books and related materials produced by Alexander Hendras Sutherland and his wife Charlotte, née Hussey, between c.1795 and 1839.

[8] Other examples include an 1868 edition of Aloysius Bertrand's prose-poem collection Gaspard de la Nuit, illustrated with watercolors by Louis Émile Benassit and Lucien Pillot for Henri Breuil, a Dijon chocolatier, now in the collection of the Bibliothèque patrimoniale et d’étude de Dijon,[9] and a copy of the Paul Meurice 1886 French translation of A Midsummer Night's Dream, covered inside and out with watercolors painted by Pinckney Marcius-Simons in 1908, in the collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., which has made all the images available online.