Abstract
In Bibliomania; or Book Madness (1811), Thomas Frognall Dibdin breaks down the act of reading into a series of operations that turn the text into a script for a material practice of collecting. Extra-illustration questions the book as a cultural object, subverts its bibliographical codes and opens its boundaries to articulate additional or alternative orders of knowledge. This essay explores two extra-illustrated Shakespeares described by Dibdin. Shakespeare editor George Steevens extended the text with engraved portraits of Shakespeare, his editors, commentators, as well as characters and places mentioned in the plays. Margaret Bingham, Lady Lucan, inlaid her edition with watercolours that attempted to recreate the aristocratic world of illuminated manuscripts and to reclaim Shakespeare from the bourgeois aesthetic of the portable gallery of prints. Together they articulate the social and aesthetic spectrum of extra-illustration.
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