Abstract
In the twenty-first century, the age-old dream of a universal library seems within reach at last, due to an expanding digital environment. But in fact, the publishing and reading practices we associate with Web 2.0 have some very old precedents. One such practice is Grangerization, a bibliophile hobby that originated in the late eighteenth century. In this period, and throughout the nineteenth century, private collectors inserted various forms of ephemera into their books: prints, letters, manuscripts, receipts, clippings. The books were usually rebound to accommodate the additional pages of tipped- and pasted-in material. The Grangerized or “extra-illustrated” book turned the linear text into a unique, multi-directional network of “links” to related texts, and recast the reader as the writer’s collaborator.
Highlights
In the twenty-first century, the age-old dream of a universal library seems within reach at last, due to an expanding digital environment
We like to think that the first breakthrough enabled the creation of powerful new electronic tools, like databases — a regime of managed order to replace loss and disarray — and that the second changed the transaction between reader and writer, from uni-directional trajectory to multi-directional network
In 1769, Granger published his Biographical History of England, from Egbert the Great to the Revolution, in which he developed a hierarchy of biographical classes important to England’s national self-definition. (Predictably, kings and clergymen were at the top, poets filled the middle ranks, and women and criminals came in at the bottom.) Granger’s aim was to help collectors learn the lives of those depicted in the portrait prints that, Textual Cultures 8.1 (2013): 57–71
Summary
In the twenty-first century, the age-old dream of a universal library seems within reach at last, due to an expanding digital environment. Granger had his History published with blank leaves to be used for notes, so that readers could record in the book references to their own print collections.
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