HOW THE ART OF EXTRA-ILLUSTRATION PRODUCED
A UNIQUE VERSION OF THE BIBLE
by Lori Anne Ferrell
In this enlightened age, we treat books with respect—a bit too much respect, perhaps, considering the dire reports issued daily on illiteracy. My students highlight their assigned texts with garishly colored abandon, but outside the university classroom, it seems, few people dare do more than inscribe their name on the flyleaf of a book, let alone remove its pages or dismantle its bindings.
Yet there has always been an open and thriving market for bits of books. In the mid-19th century, for example, a London print seller and bookbinder named James Gibbs removed the binding from a modest two-volume Bible originally edited by a clergyman named John Kitto. Gibbs interleaved its now-loose pages with his own vast assortment of prints and engravings of biblical scenes, mounting both the original pages and his own prints on uniformly-sized sheets of paper. Now “extra-illustrated” and rebound, Kitto’s Bible became a new book but retained its old name. By the time a later owner—Theodore Irwin of Oswego, N.Y.—finished supplementing Gibbs’ earlier work, the set had expanded into 60 volumes. Henry E. Huntington purchased the “Kitto Bible,” possibly the largest Bible in the world, in 1919.
No matter its sacred status—in fact, precisely because of its sacred status—the Bible has often been dealt with in this incisive fashion. Not a single book, but a library of books covering a vast range of stories, purposes, and historical epochs, the Bible has been dismantled and reassembled for better study on a regular basis over the nearly two thousand years of its history as a Christian compilation. One memorable example predates the Kitto by 200 years. In Little Gidding, a private home near Huntingdon, England, members of the extended family of Nicholas Ferrar, a deacon in the early 17th-century Church of England, spent many hours carefully snipping the passages of all four gospels out of Renaissance Bibles. They then glued these scraps of Scripture onto clean sheets of paper in order to create one continuous, coherent gospel narrative out of the four different versions presented in the New Testament. Ferrar used the books to catechize the community’s children, who were required to read through a Harmony in its entirety every month.
The Little Gidding Harmonies are not the only books that dealt with the confusions of gospel narrative by way of the cut-and-paste method. In 1795, Thomas Jefferson outlined an ambitious plan he had once sketched out with the Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush: to write an account comparing the “moral precepts” of Jesus to those of the ancient philosophers.
I have made a wee little book, which I call the Philosophy of Jesus. It is a paradigma of his doctrines, made by cutting the texts out of the book, and arranging them on the pages of a blank book, in a certain order of time or subject. A more beautiful morsel of ethics I have never seen.
Jefferson simply discarded those parts of the gospel accounts that did not correspond, either to each other or to his own sense of what constituted respectable moral teaching.
The Kitto Bible represents, then, a seemingly more secular and unusual style of interactive scriptural interpretation, built from a leisured pastime. Extra-illustration, which flourished in Britain and America between the mid-18th and the early 20th century, was also called “grangerizing” after its first advocate, the Rev. James Granger, an 18th-century English cleric and enthusiastic collector of published portraits. Grangerizing eventually captured the attention of print sellers, who recognized its potential for organizing and presenting not only the paintings and drawings, but also the pages and reproductions (often excised from printed books and manuscripts) they then sold to extra-illustrators. The print sellers’ canny appropriation of the hobbyists’ own techniques thus created a tight circle of acquisition and commerce.
The Kitto Bible is proof that collecting, like all hobbies, walks a thin line between gentle pastime and fierce obsession. It contains more than 30,000 added engravings and drawings, as well as hundreds of excised leaves from many other printed Bibles. Called “one of the most comprehensive collections of early European prints in America,” it has appeared to more than one dazzled observer to contain nearly every visual image of biblically inspired topics that could have been made available to an obsessively ambitious 19th-century collector. The prints—woodcuts and engravings—represent every major school of art from the 15th through the 19th centuries.
By far the largest number of Kitto prints depict typical biblical characters and subjects: “The prodigal son,” “Job in despair,” “Herod in his rage,” “Noah’s ark,” “The empty tomb,” and the like. Judging by sheer numbers alone, it would seem that Gibbs included every single version of each topic he could find, which he then grouped first by schools and then by date. Prints of the most popular subjects—“Eve tempting Adam” or “The Expulsion from Paradise,” for example—can run to 40 or 50 versions, and in each grouping we observe how famous artists influenced not only each other but also the lesser artists who made their livings producing copies of famous works. Turning page after page of the same depiction thus provides a crash course in the patterns and fashions of religious iconography. To view all the prints keyed to a particular passage, in chronological sequence, can feel more than a bit like leafing through a family album of scriptural symbolism.
One person’s remarkable industry, then, turned an ordinary Bible into an extraordinarily comprehensive collection of scriptural arts and letters, but what we may never know is exactly why. We know very little about the man listed on its title pages. Our Mr. J. Gibbs may well have crafted all 60 volumes to serve as devices to display prints for the purpose of sale. (If this is so, however, it is a remarkable case of commercial overkill.) In fact, we cannot be absolutely sure that James Gibbs did the actual collecting himself or even collected for others on commission. For all we know, he may simply have done the cutting and pasting.
Which leaves us with an obvious question: Is the Kitto Bible simply an overstuffed Victorian curiosity cabinet or a book in its own right? With scissors, paste, and theological intent, Nicholas Ferrar and Thomas Jefferson created coherent gospel narratives. But with its original two little volumes tucked well away in 60 folios, each roughly the height (and seemingly the weight) of a home safe, the Kitto might well stretch the concept of a book to an illogical extreme.
Can we read it?
The answer to that question is perhaps best sought in its Book of Job. Memorable enough to have circulated orally for more than a century before it was finally written down, the Old Testament Book of Job has a tidy plot and plenty of narrative drive. It is structured as any good story ought to be, with a beginning, a middle, and an end: a prologue that features a conversation between God and Satan that sets a tale spinning into motion; a set of attention-grabbing, heart-wrenching reports of the destruction of all Job holds dear that advances the plot; a series of accelerating and ultimately unsatisfying debates between Job and his friends over the reason for Job’s suffering that raises the tension level to unbearable heights—and then a daring, impassioned challenge to God by Job that leads to a sweeping denouement: God’s breathtaking declaration of divine power and justice. The End.
In the Kitto Job, this powerful narrative is accompanied by visual imagery every bit as profuse and evocative as the Hebrew Bible’s original poetry. Amidst a plethora of pages from other Bibles (and what is, quite possibly, the largest grouped collection of depictions of Job being harangued by his wife in the history of engraved art), the volume is regularly and frequently punctuated by prints from two remarkable 18th-century series. These two very different series create a visual analog—and dialogue—that stretches across the whole of the volume and provides a narrative “spine” for the story.
The Kitto Job contains a large number of the fascinating plates from an ambitious and eccentric visual encyclopedia created by the Swiss physician Johann Jakob Scheuchzer. Scheuchzer spent four years cataloging the fossils and other artifacts held by the Public Library of Zurich, creating in the process a system designed to make scientific knowledge available to the public, demonstrate rational proof for the existence of God, and explicate the natural history underpinning Protestant doctrine. His images combine mathematical calibrations, highly detailed depictions of flora and fauna, and faithful renderings of the geological and cosmological record with imaginative theological iconography: angelic beings, the voice of God, the scales of divine justice. Scheuchzer’s is a strikingly beautiful attempt to make religious truths evident to the eye—and, therefore, believable.
Another notable set of engravings in the Kitto Job takes quite a different, though no less spiritual, view. Illustrations of the Book of Job, Invented & Engraved by William Blake (1826), arguably Blake’s most powerful artistic achievement, is a series of 21 scenes from this most compelling of the tales told in the Hebrew Bible. The swirling lineaments that fuse the figure of God, the forms of angels, and the human players in this visual drama find their refrain in the arcing words, extracted from the scriptural text, that frame each image. The effect is neither rational nor natural: Blake’s faith required no explanation and no proof. His religion was a religion of art—and his art was an art of magnificently, eccentrically realized imagination.
Unusual for an extra-illustrated book, however, the Kitto also contains a more focused plot within its narrative, one made up of underlined passages on the pages of the original Bible around which the vast collection associated with James Gibbs was dispersed. When we read only those highlighted passages, the essential elements of the Book of Job remain, expressed in the pertinent turns of its plot: disaster strikes; Satan departs the story, leaving the washing-up to others; Job acknowledges his fate; he defends his God once and his faith twice; and then he is put in his place by the One whose works transcend any human ability to praise or justify or explain.
It seems clear, then, that our extra-illustrator was moving about his task intentionally, but on further examination it also seems he may well have been tracking the intentions of another, more famous biblical analyst: William Blake. For with only one exception, every underlined passage in the Kitto Job faces or is sandwiched between engravings from the Blake series. The extra-illustrator’s intent might well have been simply to highlight the aspects of the story already given prominence in this well-known collection of prints. In short, the underlinings may be nothing more than a set of labels advertising Blake’s Book of Job.
Does this return us to a merely commercial argument for the Kitto’s existence? Possibly. Does this mean the primary purpose of the Kitto was not to tell the biblical story but to house art? Who cares? A measure of the Kitto’s transcendent greatness is that one can find between its covers—bound next to each other as if in passionate and contentious conversation—the rational works of a Johann Scheuchzer and the mystical works of a William Blake. At the very least, the Kitto stands as an incomparable testament to the manifold complexities of the Victorian religious temperament, poised uneasily between the recognition of science and the demands of faith. But it also reflects the range of voices—historical and current, competing and complementary—that can be read into any Bible.
Lori Anne Ferrell is professor of English and History at Claremont Graduate University. She is an NEH Research Fellow at The Huntington for 2006. This article is adapted from a chapter in her upcoming book The Bible and the People, to be published by Yale University Press in 2007.
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