This chapter considers how Puccini was represented visually, predominantly through the still fairly new medium of photojournalism. The author discusses the marketing strategies devised by the Ricordi publishing house in order to promote Puccini to the readers of its various illustrated magazines as the successor to Verdi. Initially portrayed as a rather Bohemian young student, Puccini soon came to be depicted as the epitome of stylish Italian manliness. Visual representations of the composer – not only photographs but also paintings and sketches – exploited his connections to the Tuscan landscape of his native region, as Puccini was increasingly co-opted into the project of forging a national identity for the recently unified country. Care was taken to represent Puccini as an emblem of modernity and dynamism, and this was an image of the composer that was presented not only at home in Italy but all around the world.

Despite a rich range of varied styles and modes of production of fine arts and crafts during the fin de siècle in Britain, a relatively small set of imagery – the decadent stylings of Aubrey Beardsley, for example – has come to define the age. Drawing on the contemporary idea of the “unity of the arts,” this chapter seeks to expand an understanding of 1890s visuality through the potential of the digital. It first explores the literary/visual/artistic intersections of the 1890s, from Pre-Raphaelite antecedents through the Arts and Crafts movement and book illustration. It then turns to the digital, especially advances in interoperability and rich metadata, to consider the ways that technology can both simulate and illuminate fin-de-siècle artistic intersections, complementing previous modes of thinking about the 1890s while offering a more comprehensive view of the diverse visual culture of the period. Like ideals about the unity of the arts, these new transmedial approaches offer enormous promise but are not without their challenges and limitations.

Herman Melville’s most famous illustrator, Rockwell Kent (1882–1971) designed and illustrated Moby Dick in 1930. At the same time, he was writing and illustrating his own book, N by E, an account of his recent misadventures on the crew of a small boat sailing to Greenland. In both projects, Kent depicted ship, ocean, sailor, and creature with obsessive accuracy. Such a devoted socialist that he donated a trove of paintings to the Soviet Union in 1960 even after revelations about the regime that disillusioned many lifelong socialists, he was also a keen observer of the coastlines of Maine, Newfoundland, Alaska, and the Arctic. The specificity of his knowledge and the fervor with which he sought out adventures show in his inky, fantastic tableaus and head- and tailpieces for Moby Dick. His edition coincided with and helped solidify Melville’s canonization in the twentieth century – the so-called Melville revival – while also reaching a new kind of reader through the Book-of-the-Month Club. His was perhaps the most beloved American illustrated reprint of its time, and certainly the best known of the reprints examined here.

The coda traces the ways that the reprints featured in this book have continued to reverberate in the culture at large. It asks what to make of the reprinted book and the home library in our current age which is, on the one hand, increasingly online, and, on the other, increasingly preoccupied with the aesthetics of books and bookshelves.

Paratexts of all kinds became more significant as antiquity wore on. The Homeric epics, for example, and Herodotus’ Histories were not originally divided into books; the canonical book divisions were made only in the Hellenistic period. Despite evidence for the spread of paratexts, editors and scholars often ignore them. They do so, in part, because paratexts are inherently unstable texts; and yet, as ephemeral products of their own literary culture, paratexts provide precious evidence for how poetry was read at any given time or place. The first goal of this chapter is to the collate evidence for section headings, illustrations, and prefaces being produced for poetic texts in the East and West in Late Antiquity in Latin and in Greek. The second goal is to compare their use in each tradition and to analyze where the cultures either converged or departed in their use of paratexts. The evidence collated reveals that new paratextual forms appear around the same time in Greek and Latin, but that there are also separate developments in each tradition.

Mid-century public libraries legislation in Britain was directed mostly at the use of modern books, but some of the larger libraries also built up substantial collections of early books. Specialefforts were made by some to collect local literature of all kinds, as awareness grew also of the importance of the mass of published ephemera that underpinned social activity.

This chapter proposes that if scholars accepted the idea that authorship was but one form of creative contribution among many to the production of literary texts, our recognition of the breadth, impact, and influence of African Americans in all kinds of presumptive white literary production would allow us to expand the category “African American literature” considerably. Book history offers empirical and conceptual measures for conceiving “African American literature” as (1) texts read or consumed by African Americans, (2) texts that are about African Americans or that represent the experiences of African Americans, (3) texts to which African Americans deployed trades or skills (such as engraving, typesetting, bookkeeping, shipping) that may not bear the dignity of creative genius, or (4) texts that are edited by African Americans – in addition to and overlapping with (5) the more familiar conception of “African American literature” as texts authored by African Americans. Drawing examples from Phillis Wheatley’s Poems, Frederick Douglass’s Paper, and The Prodigal Daughter with illustrations by the enslaved Peter Fleet, this essay does not dispute the historical significance of African American literary and textual production so much as to think historically and theoretically about why authorship has been such a prominent part of that significance.

Chapter 3 analyzes Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s illustrations alongside a formal analysis of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market (1862) to draw further attention to the creative and communal processes associated with intertextual collaborative production. Reading this collaboration through the lens of sympathetic collaboration allows for an understanding of fellow-feeling dependent on the articulation of both individual and communal viewpoints – acknowledging difference – and the means of self-assimilation to form community. Reading Goblin Market as a collaborative lyric establishes how the poem constructs a reproduction of the Rossetti collaboration and underscores the interrelationships between word and image and community development. Placing the poem alongside the reformative work Christina Rossetti completed at Highgate Penitentiary, this chapter provides a direct contextual link to sympathetic concord and its inflection of moral reform. Reading the Rossettis’ contemporaneous literary productions as sympathetic collaborations that inform one another reveals, more broadly, the interlacings of shared experiences and literary and artistic productions within the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

During the search for Franklin, it was common for expeditions to intentionally winter over in the Arctic sea ice. Indeed, some ships remained in the Arctic for up to six years. The ships in winter quarters provided space and time for cultural production; a lively homosocial life inspired material for illustrations and articles that were compiled as handwritten ‘magazines’ intended to be read solely by the ship’s company. This chapter takes a closer look at the production of these fascinating and revealing illustrated on-board periodicals, which were a key part of the maritime culture during the Franklin search. The illustrations in the periodicals are, in the main, human-centred, turning inwards to observe the ship’s inhabitants in winter quarters, focusing on social interaction and incidents. The Arctic itself and expedition members’ incongruous domestic life was the source of a humour that was personal and particular to the expedition members’ situation. Intended both for amusement on board and as future objects of nostalgia, the periodicals satirise the British experience in the Arctic and effectively utilise the Arctic environment as a rich resource of humour.

This chapter uses contemporary readers’ marks in anonymous English herbals to argue that Renaissance readers used printed texts as opportunities to record their own experiences of native plants and medical experiments, pushing back against a pervasive view of early herbal readers as credulous and unsophisticated. Printed books like The Grete Herball (1526), the first illustrated printed herbal in England, were the products of publishers who were evaluating the market for particular texts in print and who tested new affordances and marketing strategies on their readers as they published and republished old herbals. Some publishers, like Thomas Gibson, saw in their editions of the herbals an opportunity to endorse medical practitioners’ authority over the body.

Chapter 4 shows dinosaurs’ link to concerns about secularisation and specialisation contributed to Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous romance The Lost World. It argues that the text can be understood in relation to Conan Doyle’s romantic approach to scientific knowledge, especially his strident anti-materialism and aversion to technical jargon. Examining archival material from New York Public Library’s Berg Collection, including the original manuscript, Fallon weaves the content of The Lost World together in surprising ways with Conan Doyle’s palaeontological forays, cryptozoological sightings, and interest in psychical research, showing that noting the differences between the US and UK serialised and book versions provides a more precise understanding of Conan Doyle’s intended romantic effects. In particular, Fallon emphasises the illustrations by Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law, Patrick Forbes. Alongside the text, these subtle and meticulously planned images make clear the author’s desire to convince readers that the world is full of unexplained wonders. As such, the British book edition in which Forbes’s images appear was, for Conan Doyle, the correct way to experience The Lost World.

Begins by examining the career of the publisher Thomas Pavier in order to provide context for a puzzling collection of texts that he issued in 1619. The collection would seem to be the first attempt to offer the public a 'selected works' of Shakespeare, though, in fact, some of the plays included have only a tenuous connection to the playwright. The logistics of the project are considered, as well as the various arguments for why it appears to have been undertaken in a rather clandestine fashion. The chapter then moves on to consider the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, the 'First Folio', published in 1623. The volume is viewed within the context of the overarching career of Edward Blount, its primary investor. The progression of the volume through the printshop of William and Isaac Jaggard is tracked, drawing on the seminal work of Charlton Hinman, who made extensive use of the collection of First Folios established by Emily and Henry Clay Folger. The subsequent set of folio editions issued between 1632 and 1700 is also discussed.

This chapter scrutinizes early frontispieces contained within books by Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano and then proceeds to examine the illustrated antislavery books of Moses Roper and Henry Bibb (both of which also contain frontispieces as well as other types of illustrations). Although Roper’s book was published in 1837 and Bibb’s in 1849, this chapter argues that both men (being born in 1815 and having participated in the antislavery movement) were responding to the abject treatment of the enslaved in earlier antislavery materials. The words of the text interact with its visual optic to interpellate the reader and envision a figurative mode of agency and self-possession for the enslaved body and the freed Black subject. The chapter concludes with a forward glance at artworks by Kara Walker and Glen Ligon that also attempt to excavate (although in a more abstract way) the trace of a resistant visual tradition within African American literature and US visual culture.

Using error as a method of looking at initials and marginalia, this chapter considers how artists and scribes went against expected word and image play in the manuscript to reflect on the process of reading and recitation – and the confusions and misunderstandings that could potentially ensue. By focusing on several case studies, the reader is walked through the various interpretations that marginalia and initials deployed and how these (at times conflicting) understandings were generatively put into question and undone by subtle variations in color and placement. The goal of this chapter is to show how illuminators worked alongside the text to generate an illustrative program that was surprising and complex in ways that demanded the concerted attention and focus of readers as they chanted the Gospel text.

Introduction to the Gospel lectionary, its illustration and usage in the Divine Liturgy, and how a consideration of ritual and sound unsettles expectations from iconography.

The introduction to the book historicises early responses to Sterne’s pioneering visual devices and establishes the rarity of illustrated first edition novels at mid-eighteenth century. It provides an insight into Sterne’s remarkable contribution to the history of the novel while justifying the scope of this project, which is to tackle mid-century book design more broadly. If first edition novels did not traditionally include visuals, what kind of books did? It also provides a brief outline of the contents.

The third volume of Tristram Shandy opens with Tristram’s eventual arrival into the Shandy family, when his nose is crushed during a bungled forceps delivery, causing Walter to throw himself prostrate on the bed. Sterne inserts his most startling innovation, the marbled page, within a volume almost entirely concerned with the publication and collection of medical books. This chapter situates Sterne’s remarkable visual device within a history of colour book illustration dominated by scientific works of the kind treasured by Walter Shandy. It also recounts the history of marbled paper, commonly recognised as book binding material but lesser known as medical packaging for nostrums prescribed to treat wounds and ailments. As a colour illustration in the instalment of Tristram Shandy addressing a wounded nose, for eighteenth-century readers the colour and dimensions of the marbled leaf would have simultaneously recalled colour-illustrated medical books and distinctively packaged branded remedies. The marbled page, therefore, references a full range of paper materials seeking to theorise, diagnose and treat malfunctioning bodies.