Extra-illustration, preservation and libraries in the nineteenth-century United States

Abstract

Extra-illustration, usually considered an eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century British phenomenon, is abundantly present in the creative book practices of the late nineteenth-century United States, but it is often overlooked in scholarship. Analysing the collecting, cutting and pasting habits of Massachusetts banker Nathaniel Paine, this article argues that extra-illustration was closely connected to the then emerging modes of information organization that have since shaped modern libraries. Paine added hundreds of mass-produced images of US president George Washington to the volumes in his library, including a group of pamphlets printed just after Washington died in 1799. This unusual group of pamphlets, as well as Paine’s other extra-illustrative supplements to his volumes and scrapbooks, reveal an effort not only to preserve a particular version of the past but also to develop an indexing scheme built around pictures.