Book excerpt: Barry Moser is generally and justly regarded as the most important book artist of the past quarter-century, a tradition begun in this country by N.C. Wyeth, extended by Rockwell Kent, and furthered by artists as diverse as Jim Dine and Leonard Baskin. Moser's watercolors, woodcuts, and wood engravings have informed and adorned more than a hundred books, many of them central to the English-speaking canon, by writers such as Melville, Shelley, Welty, and Twain. In all his efforts, it is his preoccupation with the character of the creator that is manifest and dominant. Here, in a selection of one hundred portraits, fifty of them created especially for this book, we see the full range of his genius in portrayals of writers (Dante, Dickens, O'Connor, Willard, Oates), musicians and composers (Chopin, Handel, Wagner), artists (Whistler, Rembrandt, Shahn), and even politicians (Lincoln, King, Webster).