How to Read a Book

Abstract

Over the course of the 18 th century, books acquired pictures. An increasingly crowded literary marketplace created a demand for ever more elaborately and attractively packaged books, and illustration was a central part of this competitive book market. This essay will consider the various roles of the litera ry frontispiece: what these images can tell us about the way individual works were markete d, and about how books were used. Existing discussion of frontispieces in 18 -century literary texts has tended to focus on authorial portraits, and their role in the self-fashioning or the literary afterlife of the author. 1 But numerous works were not prefaced by pictures o f individual authors: often because the book contained works by multiple writers, or because the works within were not attributed. The verse miscellany, a compil ation of verse, music, and prose by a range of authors was one of the most popular litera ry forms in this period, and it offered a particular kind of reading experience for its con sumers – verse and prose in sections or snippets, often unattributed, by a wide range of au thors. The frontispieces of such collections framed their contents in very different wa ys to single author works, and in doing so, have their own story to tell us about the marke ting of literature in this period.