Filing, Extra-illustrating or Scrap-Booking: Francis Douce (1757–1834) as Practitioner

An examination of the material pasted into early books collected by Francis Douce reveals that the collector had a high degree of familiarity with his collection and was able to return to places within it to add and revise material. Although scholars like Lucy Peltz have attempted to distinguish bibliographical practices such as filing for retrieval and extra-illustration, many of the different sorts of intervention displayed in Douce’s collection — the insertion of pictures, loose leaves, and sales catalogues — occupy an intermediate space between these two practices. Additions can be interpreted as illustration of the text into which they are pasted or as material filed for later retrieval. Whilst, in some cases, the collector’s annotations reveal one or the other motive behind his practice, many more cases are indeterminate and could be interpreted as fulfilling either role, or indeed both simultaneously.