Lou's Blog

Here is the text/notes I started writing as content for my book. Definitely need to look at more on Hair Albums.


Extra-Illustration/Grangerizing

Extra-Illustration, or grangerizing is the practice of taking apart books and adding in blank pages for inserting your own extra content, like illustrations, photographs, letters, autographs and so on. It was an 18th century practice that started in England as a way for gentlemen to demonstrate their wealth, ownership, and taste by essentially recreating a book with costly prints. However, anyone who owned a book could be an extra-illustrator. It sprang from James Granger’s Biographical history of England in 1769. His book included lists of portraits that readers actually went and found and included in their own personal copies. “Grangerizing” continued on into other texts and was considered a legitimate way of enjoying books.
Shakespeare became a popular subject in grangerizing because of the many options of materials one could include like portraits of actors, historical figures, characters, and things like playbills. There were also many copies of Shakespeare’s plays that one could use.
Extra-Illustration sometimes was not viewed in a positive way. It had been argued that you should be reading the books for the content, not customizing it for your own enjoyment. However, the extra-illustrations that were added were usually relevant to the text itself, meaning the books were read before they were taken apart. Some were also accused of “breaking up a good book to illustrate a worse one.” (1892 critic?)


Hair Albums

In the 19th century, it was common for young women to exchange locks of their own hair as tokens of friendship and kept them in albums. Similar to a friendship album, girls would include locks of woven hair, paper cutouts, and poems and autographs by their friends and family. In an album by Helen Marion Adams, David and Melinda Bosworth included a hair weaving, two paper hearts and the words, “A small memento left behind recalls an absent friend to mind.”

Hair does not decompose and represents a person and memories of them even when they are gone.


“This lock of hair
I once did wear,
And now do freely give,
That you may see and think of me,
As long as you do live.”