Two Sylvias' Weekly Muse: April 27, 2025
Issue 156
Hello, Poets!
As we say goodbye to April and National Poetry Month, we would like to leave you with an interesting idea to try with your favorite poetry collection. (Caution—if you recoil at the thought of writing notes in books and prefer to keep your pages pristine, the following information may disturb you!) We would like to introduce you to the old practice of “grangerizing” a book. The term comes from James Granger, an 18th-century English biographer who published A Biographical History of England (1769). He encouraged readers to collect and insert their own portraits of historical figures into the book. To “grangerize” came to mean customizing or expanding a book by adding illustrations, annotations, notes, or other inserted materials. This practice was popular during the Victorian period, when readers would enhance their books by pasting in engravings, clippings, illustrations, and handwritten notes.
If you have a beloved poetry collection (and you don’t feel faint at the thought…