Watercolour landscape of Dover Beach on the fore-edge of Sarah Ellis’s Wives of England, 1843 by an unknown artist.(© The John Rylands Research Institute and Library, The University of Manchester, 2025)

Books about the Book abound with definitions, their authors keen to pin down its qualities. For some ‘it is a machine to think with’ (I.A. Richards), others place emphasis on its ability to speak as ‘a material support for inscribed language’ (Jessica Brantley). Many prize it as a communication databank, a ‘storehouse of human knowledge intended for dissemination […] containing arrangements of signs that convey information’ (Frederick Kilgour). Meanwhile, the books themselves offer many challenges to being typecast in such a fashion. As blocks of pages bound on one side and held together between covers, books often offer the obdurate resistance of their own particular and unyielding materiality. Even in mapping the metaphors of books, commentators appear to recognise their ‘thingness’ only up to the point when they are opened and their ‘set of surfaces and physical aspects give way to the abstraction of their texts’ (Susan Stewart). But books always operate ‘between different mediatic layers within a nested system’ (Alexander Galloway) which do not disclose their meanings purely through the act of reading the written texts housed within them. Books, after all, also reveal meaning by showing as well as telling.

Take, for example, the case of the painting shown here. Perched on the edge of the pages of Sarah Ellis’s book Wives of England, which urges women to embrace dependent domesticity and to submit to their subordinate legal and social positions, we are shown a miniature ink and watercolour seascape, delineating Dover Beach, its cliffs ‘glimmering and vast’ (Matthew Arnold) amid the bustle of life and adventure, sea and sail ruffled in the breeze. It is one of two such scenes secreted behind the book’s gilding. Known as double fore-edge or vanishing paintings, these exquisite ‘materialised secrets’ (Stewart) remain concealed unless the book’s pages are closed and fanned. Generally unattributed to specific individuals, these paintings are thought to be derived from the work of other creative artists. William Westall’s topographical drawings, which circulated in the 1830s and were printed in books such as Great Britain Illustrated, may have provided the source in this case. Highly fashionable and attracting large sums, their sequestered power to personalise and rarify seemingly ordinary books was irresistible to collectors and bibliophiles alike.

But why else is it here? With little to do with the transmission of information and everything to do with the creation of art, a fore-edge painting cannot challenge the authority of the text with which it cohabits. Yet, the delightful tiny worldview of colour and light shown here feels sharply at variance with the message of Ellis’s dictatorial text ‘promoting a domestic role for others while devoting herself to writing’ (H.S. Twycross). If the interfaces of a book are like ‘a kind of magician’s cape, continuously revealing layers by concealing what they reveal’ (Lori Emerson), might not the billowing fresh air captured in our painting undermine or even silence the aridity of such a text by charming its reader into keeping the book’s pages fanned but shut?