The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens presents “Illuminated Palaces: Extra-Illustrated Books from The Huntington Library” an exhibition on view from July 27 to Oct. 28, 2013.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, historians, bibliophiles, and collectors turned ordinary books into extraordinary “illuminated palaces”—repositories for original art, prints and engravings, maps, autograph letters, and the excised pages of other, more famous books. This process of destruction and transformation, often called “extra-illustration” or “grangerizing” (after its most famous early advocate, the Rev. James Granger, an 18th-century cleric), was once a genteel hobby in the United States and Britain. http://huntington.org