A more definite alliance between book-illustration and decoration developed during the nineties of the last century, and the artistic activities in this direction were of a distinguished and interesting character. Several notable artists were at work, and among them one must not forget Mr. William Strang with his illustrative etchings, for it would be difficult to find a more intuitive pictorial interpreter of Burns or of Stevenson. One remembers also the expressively decorative designs of Mr. Laurence Housman and the graces of the so-called Birmingham School; above all, one recalls the appearance of two great original draughtsmen of widely different temperaments, both masters of line, both vitally artistic, both of enduring influence--Phil May and Aubrey Beardsley. And both of these were content to let their lines speak through the photographic medium. _The Yellow Book_ and _The Savoy_ came and passed away, but they left us Beardsley, and with him no fresh pictorial understanding of life and character such as we got from the humanly humorous genius of Phil May, but a new decorative value of line and the balance of black and white masses. This is Beardsley’s influence, quite distinct possibly from his fantastic manner of conception, but it is the secret of the permanent artistic worth of his graphic interpretations of Oscar Wilde’s “Salome” and Pope’s “Rape of the Lock.” At the present moment book-illustration is in an interesting phase, with its spreading tendencies towards page-decoration, and suggestive rather than realistic pictorial treatment of the text. In the following pages a fairly representative selection of drawings will show what many of our leading illustrators have been doing of late. It will be noticed that, with the clearness and precision possible to the modern photographic process-block, pure line is favoured for black-and-white; while recent developments of the three-colour process place within the possibilities of the artist a very wide range of tones and harmonies. Indeed, it would seem that, however the book-illustrator may wish to vary his manner in sympathy with the character of the text he is illustrating, the present mediums of reproduction will prove responsive to his need.