Extra-illustration is a word and image practice in which readers alter their books through adding visual elements to them. It was a means for archiving the self through preserving one’s interpretation of a text with personally selected images. In the case of eighteenth-century writer Horace Walpole’s extra-illustrated manuscript for Aedes Walpolianae (‘The House of the Walpoles’) (1747), a room-by-room description of the art collection of Houghton Hall, Walpole’s ancestral home, the extra-illustrated book function both as a personal archive and a multi-media mode of writing through integrating two forms of print: printed text with visual prints, and multiple forms of line-making: script, drawing and engraving. Walpole’s manuscript will be placed within the framework of memory and archival studies where the archive is conceived as a concrete place that registers also as an imaginary space the more deeply one ventures into the paper materials of one’s past that it houses.