Name: A Guide to Personalising Books *grangerising*
Uploaded: 2025-04-05T13:39:26.000Z
Duration: 17 min 51 s
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Have you heard of Grangerising? Grangerising is where you customise your favourite books.

It's where you interleave and stick in pictures and articles and thoughts and notes and you create these volumes which are completely personal to you and it's just such a beautiful idea and a wonderful way to make your books more special, more significant, more personal to you. In today's video I'm going to be talking through the practice and history of Grangerising and how you can start Grangerising your books. So where does the word Grangerising come from?

The word comes from James Granger who was an 18th century bibliophile and book collector and he wrote a very significant book in 1769 called Bibliographical History of England from

Egbert the Great to the Revolution. And this book is kind of about print collecting and the practice of collecting prints, maps, significant documents, artefacts and the book itself, the book that James Granger wrote, did not include any pictures apart from the portrait of him at the front. However his friend Richard Bull was inspired by this book to enhance his print collection and as part of this he cut up James Granger's book and he compiled the advice in a cut and stick method alongside the prints that he had in his collection.

He had to rebind it because it was so much thicker than it had been before. And today this particular copy is called the Bull Granger and it can be found in the Huntington Library.

And it's from this that we get the word Grangerising. So when you Grangerise a book you can join the text with multimedia prints and illustrations and documents which weren't printed in the original copy of the book. It's worth noting though that the verb Grangerise wasn't used until much later at the Fin de siècle, like the following century. And then in 1892 there was a treatise published by Daniel Treadwell which you can read on the Internet Archive.

It's called A Monograph on Privately Illustrated Books. Treadwell talks about extra illustration and Grangerising as an ever popular art and practice. And there writing in 1892 Treadwell talks about the practice of collecting prints solely with the purpose of using them to put into books. And he says in his own experience this process led to making them, his books, of more actual service, more cyclopedic in their character and more scientific than autistic.

And it's interesting because this is pointing to how Grangerising a book and extra illustrating a book is a way of enhancing your frame of reference and bringing together things and ideas that are related but weren't kind of published and printed together. Which sounds an awful lot like another type of paper technology which we are most of us now familiar with.

And that of course is commonplacing. So when you commonplace you are compiling quotes and ideas under headings which you've taken from different places that don't usually go together.

Commonplacing was very popular in the 17th century and then Grangerising and extra illustrating was popular in the 18th and 19th centuries. But both of them are very similar in terms of the practice. I was really struck by it when I was reading about Grangerising just how similar the two are. Because in commonplacing you take a notebook and you make this into a little personal encyclopedia and when you Grangerise a book you turn a printed volume into a kind of encyclopedia. But in both cases you are compiling related information into a volume which then becomes very personal. And I think that's a wonderful frame to enter the practice of Grangerising. It's very similar to commonplacing and I would see it as an extension of commonplacing and commonplace book culture. If you want to learn more about the act of commonplacing and how to start a commonplace book in particular which is adjacent to the process of Grangerising a book then I actually have created a course all about commonplacing and how you can use the practice of commonplacing to cultivate curiosity. I created this course with Skillshare and it gives a deep dive into the history, practices, how to start a commonplace book and actually how to practically use a commonplace book to change the way that you think. Skillshare is of course the world's largest online learning community and it's a place where you can learn anything, any kind of skill. You think of it and you search it up and I'm sure somebody will have made a course on it. You can learn practical skills like video editing, marketing, graphic design but there are also so many classes around thinking and reading. Particularly relevant perhaps if you're watching this video and you're interested in changing the way that you read and you want to kind of be intentional about the act of reading, what it means to read, I would recommend you looking at Robin

Walden's classes. He's got a class on bringing intelligent reading into your life and studying humanities both of which are very useful if you're interested in acts of reading. I can also recommend Philippa Cannella's class on how to read. I particularly like how in Lesson 7 she is talking about how the same book can appeal differently to different people, hitting the nail on the head that kind of a perfect book does not exist and that books are inherently relational to the reader. Different people will take different things away from a book and that's exactly why commonplacing from a book or grangerising a book comes into its own because it's a way to show your unique connection to a book as a reader and that's going to be different for everybody. So if you are interested in Skillshare and you want to try any of these classes, learn any of these new skills, learn about commonplacing through my course, then the first 500 people to click on the link in the description box can get one month of Skillshare completely for free so you can try out all of these different classes. So that will be in the description box and thank you so much Skillshare for sponsoring this portion of the video. But anyway back to grangerising which as I say I think is an offshoot of commonplacing. It's kind of a way of turning a favourite book into a commonplace book. So I'm now going to talk through some ways that you can actually grangerise your books and how you can add that personality and that flair and that individuality to a favourite book. I think especially grangerising is valuable if you plan on rereading a book.

I don't know that I would invest the time into doing it if it weren't a book I was planning on picking up again. So the book that I'm going to be using as an example today is this absolutely marvellous book Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood which is in my top three books of all time which is really saying something. I think it's absolutely exceptional. It's about this middle-aged woman who returns to Toronto where she grew up and she's reflecting on her childhood specifically an abusive friendship with a girl Cordelia and it's just so excellently done. I love how it plays with time and nostalgia. It's so so so clever in terms of rejecting and surpassing the Bildungsroman narrative structure. So let's go think through some ways that you can actually grangerise your books. Wow that's dusty. It's a little colder down here so I've had to put on a cardigan and I've got a hot cup of Earl Grey rooibos tea. But anyway I'm going to talk through how I plan to grangerise each of these books.

I've got two books which I'm going to be focusing on. I've got Milton's Complete Shorter Poems but specifically The Mask at Ludlow Castle or Comus which is my favourite thing by Milton and I have some paintings that I've been meaning to stick in my copy for ages and so I'm actually going to do it today. And then as I said Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood. Now the first thing

I think we could add is a space at the beginning for writing down when you read this book and each of the times you reread it. So as I say I've reread this four times and so I like the idea of tracking while I still remember when I read them the dates and the details of each reread and this is going to require some speculative thinking like ideally I would have done this as soon as I read it each time but it will be a way for me to look back when

I read it in future and know the past versions of myself that have also read it. And specifically for this book which is narrated by Elaine at multiple different ages like it switches between her in the present as a middle aged woman and her as a child. I think it's quite nice about similarly having past versions of my reading self embedded within the cover of this book.

Now the second thing I think is particularly important and this is something I've started doing in my favourite books especially. So obviously at the beginning of every book you have this. You have your table of contents. This is your chapter summary. It shows you all of the key important page numbers that you need to know. So very integral that you know that chapter 4 starts on page 97. And really the table of contents is there as a guiding aid like it should be helpful so that you can find a page that is significant but really the pages that are significant are the ones with the passages and the lines that really resonate with you. And so another way to granderise a book is to make your own table of contents which is what I'm going to do with this.

I have some dog-ear pages already which tell me that page 167 is a personal favourite.

So making a note of the best pages in the book which you could even do as you're going along means that you've got those pages on hand and when you do go back and you reread it or you pick up this book from your bookshelf and just want to dip into it you know which pages to go for.

So number three, sticking in pictures and prints. Of course this is the most obvious one and where granderising actually comes about. Everything else is kind of an extension from putting prints into your books. And there are different ways that you could go about this so as you're reading maybe you are reminded of a painting that you saw in a gallery once and you decide to interleaf the painting there which I'm actually going to do in cat's eye with a painting of the Virgin Mary.

Alternately you may know of some illustrations that were inspired by the book you're reading or even a movie still from a film adaptation and similarly you could paste these into the book.

I think the best way to do it is to interleaf it so if you kind of stick it in as an extra page and then it's not obscuring any of the text and it can complement your reading as you're going through.

So I'm going to do that with Comus because I do have these absolutely beautiful illustrations printed which William Blake did.

They are some of my favourite pieces of art. I look at them very regularly and so I just want to kind of interleaf them into my book so that I can look at them alongside reading

Another thing you could do when reading especially is consult your commonplace book so if a theme like time comes up to look in your commonplace book, see if there is a quote related to time which you've taken from elsewhere and then you could just pop it into the margins and that's really where you're going to see this becoming a commonplace book, like an extension of your commonplace book.

A bridge between the physical commonplace book and your reading material book as a commonplace book too.

And then the final annotation point that I will say, and this is something that I've done, actually already done with this book and I've done with a few others, is using an invisible ink pen. This is my one, it's got like a UV light on the end. And I use invisible ink if I want to do any sort of journaling in the book. So if for example it's bringing up a memory or it's making me reflect on something philosophically or in relation to my past or anything, I will use invisible ink to journal inside the book.

I wouldn't do this with ordinary ink, like I wouldn't want it showing, but I like using invisible ink because it's like a really personal way of annotating and it can also encourage you to be less serious about annotation. Like I am very careful when I annotate, like I'm not just going to write anything. It has to feel like a very astute point or there has to be a reason for me writing something in the book with normal ink, whereas invisible ink just kind of gives a bit more freedom because it's not going to actually change the visual look of the page. And it's also really fun to kind of go back over the book when you're rereading and cast the invisible ink over it and kind of see your very raw visceral reaction to a book as you were reading it.

Very quickly, another way that you could grangerise a book is actually visual. So you could rebind a book, which is of course what Bull did when he rejigged and grangerised the copy of James

Granger's book. Rebinding might be necessary just because the book gets too thick, but also the act of binding is a way of showing like that the book is important to you and it gives it a really personal flow. Because I'm sorry, but if you picked this book up, you would not think anything of it apart from, wow, somebody did a really, really bad job of the binding. However, I look at this and I think, oh my gosh, I remember making this and it took me absolutely ages and it doesn't look perfect, but it's kind of as part of its imperfection that it has more of a story for me. Adjacent to that could be illustrating the books yourself, like adding little decorations, even fore edge painting, but customising the title page would be a lovely way to add a little bit more personality to it once again.

But yes, that's everything I wanted to talk through with you now. Hopefully there is something there that you can take away and I'm now going to give you my thoughts on the process of grangerising and why I think it's important.

I think grangerising is valuable because it turns you from a passive into an active reader.

That's a key theme when looking at 17th century literature and processes of reading, the idea of being active with what you're reading and kind of connecting to the book that you're reading. So even the act of stamping a book with an ex-libris stamp that has your name on it or your family crest traditionally. Frances Wolferston, for example, in the 17th century would write Frances, her book, in the front of her books. But there's a connection and there's an ownership to reading that which involves the reader and actually kind of physically puts the reader into the book. And that ownership, that connection definitely feels more valid and understandable considering how much rarer books were. I mean, books are still pretty expensive but when you compare the price to what it used to be, they are so, so, so affordable and they are affordable enough that, especially if we're shopping second hand, we can accumulate a lot of books. And so it kind of makes sense that we wouldn't then like customise all of our books and kind of write our names and all of our books in the same way. Though not to say that not everyone does because I do think the ex-libris stamp is making something of a comeback. But I just love how grangerising makes a book personal to you and the book itself then reflects and is testament to how much a book means to you. It kind of becomes this material marker in relation to you as the reader. It also bestows importance onto the physical object of the book as well as just the text. Like this book is significant because I bought this when I was 17 and I've read it four times since then and so it's kind of joined me in a very material way in many different life stages and it's kind of transcended time and moved with me which I think is absolutely beautiful. Effectively when you add your own illustrations, when you add tiny kind of snippets and annotations and thoughts, you're adding to the paratext of the book as well. And I think when we kind of frame it as a form of paratext, it kind of helps to even better frame like the importance of your personal copy to you as a reader. Paratext was kind of most officially and famously theorised by Jeannette in his book Paratext from 1987 and paratext is all of the stuff around the actual text. So this is the text and then the paratext will be like, you know, the four words or in this book there's quotes at the beginning from Stephen Hawking. There are dedications, there are words of thanks, you've got the information about publication, you've got like other works by Margaret Atwood here, you've got the cover, you've got what else? Oh yeah, more books by Margaret Atwood there. And these are things which are connected to the text but they're not actually part of the text and so when you grangerise a book

I feel like you're similarly making your own paratexts. And paratext helps us as a reader to frame and interpret what we are about to read. It does like change the way that we then read it, like knowing that Margaret Atwood has also written all of these famous books might help us to go, oh wow, she's a very significant author. Even just having her name, Margaret Atwood here, we know that she's written The Handmaid's Tale, we've even got a reminder that she was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, which again means that when we pick this book up we're thinking, okay this is going to be a good book. And the paratext is changing then the way that we read it. And similarly if we are adding illustrations, if we are adding prints, if we are adding thoughts in the margins, I wonder if that too becomes a form of personal paratext where when we next read it we're kind of reading it with all of those things in mind. And the fact that we ourselves as a reader have put the time into creating and customising the book in that way, it kind of tells future us that it is a really important book and it's kind of worth reading and that there's a lot of value in it. Yeah, I've been thinking about that a lot. It does also as a practice just to encourage us to be more synoptic thinkers because we're combining the text with something from elsewhere, like a quote from a commonplace book or a painting, but two things that don't necessarily always go together. So it kind of encourages the same sort of synoptic thinking that the commonplace book encourages. So I think even when we're not grandeurising a non-fiction book, there is still value being bestowed and it can still enhance our reading experience. But anyway, thank you for watching this video. I hope you found it interesting.

I hope that maybe you learnt something new and I hope that you have more than just a productive week.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

A Guide to Personalising Books grangerising

sort

stick

absolutely

significant