"That is grandpapa's Granger edition of Bishop Wilberforce's Sermons. He pasted all his naughty daguereotypes there, knowing no one would find them."

It’s 1795, and you’re a bookish person with a modest library. The trouble is that very few of your books have illustrations, because illustrations are hand-printed and expensive. Fortunately, there is a guy for that. For a price, you can have your books taken apart, enhanced with extra illustrations, and rebound in your preferred style of leather.

Let’s say you own a three-volume set of Revolutionary War history. Your book-binder (because you are the kind of person who has a binder) can add all kinds of things to it: Engravings, letters, autographs, even photographs. These might include memorabilia from your own collection or family history, or things you bought at auction, or items the bookbinder offered for sale. That three-volume set might expand to six volumes after all those treasures were added, and you’d have a truly unique set of books about the Revolutionary War.

The mass-market version of this was a Grangerized book, named after British clergyman James Granger, who published his Biographical History of England, from Egbert the Great to the Revolution in 1769. It was bound with blank leaves, with the expectation that people would add their own prints, which they might purchase from print stalls in London at the time. Nineteenth-century British bookseller Joseph Lilly expanded his copy of Granger’s book to an astonishing 27 volumes through the pasting-in of additional illustrations. This practice came to be called Grangerizing, and its practitioners Grangerites.

Granger sparked a craze for selling illustrations intended for specific titles. Imagine: a new edition of a Dickens novel comes out, and along with it you could buy a set of illustrations that you could paste in yourself (or have bound in at your book-binder’s shop) that were designed specifically for that edition.