Book excerpt: The history of book illustration is the story of a mechanical process releasing a great flowering of talent, a revolution in which photomechancial methods of reproduction provided a medium for a new scholl of illustrators. This book examines the methods and looks at the illustrators as well as their books describing their markets, training, tehcniques, remuneration and professional and social lives. It includes a chronologically arranged checklist of the illustrated books of over seventy artists, ranging from Aubrey Beardsley, Edmund Dulac, Arthur Rackham, Howard Pyle to the little known John Batten, Vernon Hill, Reginald Birch and Willy Pogány. It also includes contributions made to the genre by female artists as Mabel Lucie Attwell, Gwynedd Hudson, Margaret Tarrant, Millicent Sowerby, Mary Wheelhouse and many others.