Remade

Abstract

Extra-illustration remakes a book through a series of interventions that modify its bibliographic form. The smallest of these involves pasting materials in the margin, but often the book’s gatherings are disbound, the pages mounted on larger sheets, and additional sheets are interleaved to accommodate materials such as prints, watercolors, and manuscript pages. As the book’s format and size are altered from octavo to folio, from one to many volumes, its new partitions rearticulate its units of perception, the rhythm, and hand-eye coordination that mark the act of reading. The extra-illustrated book is a composite of objects and interventions from different periods. This chapter considers the extra-illustration of Shakespeare. When and why is a book remade? What happens to the book as a medium? Is it an updated, backdated, embellished support for reading or viewing, or does it become something else? At what point does the book stop being a book?