Sinclair, Helen M......166, 167 Southall, Joseph E......168 Sullivan, Edmund J., A.R.W.S......v, 169-174 Thomson, Hugh.....175-181 Wade, Charles.....182-184 Wiles, Frank.....185, 186 Williams, R. James.....187, 188 Yeats, Jack B., R.H.A......189-192 [Illustration: _BY R. ANNING BELL FROM “A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM” (J. M. DENT AND SONS)_] BRITISH BOOK-ILLUSTRATION. BY MALCOLM C. SALAMAN Who does not love a picture-book? Yet how few comparatively still love it for anything but the pleasure of recognizing images mentally familiar or readily suggested--personalities, incidents, scenes--irrespective of any sensuous gratification from artistic qualities of presentation, of design, of composition! How few, in short, appreciate the distinction between illustration that is merely reproductive and illustration that is both interpretative and decorative! This appreciation is certainly on the increase, but, much as the artists and the makers of books are doing to stimulate it, much remains to do. The appeal of the picture-book is universal; but the Book Beautiful, in which the printed text and the illustrative scheme are conceived as a decorative whole, is as yet a rare thing. How much our joy in a book may be enhanced by pictorial embellishment must depend, of course, upon our individual conception of illustration in relation to the permanent elements of pictorial art. That most human of book-lovers, Charles Lamb, admitted that he preferred to read Shakespeare, not in the First Folio, but in the common editions with plates so execrably bad that they served as maps, or modest remembrancers, to the text without pretending any supposable emulation with it. But we must remember that Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery engravings were then the example--the awful example, one might say--of the highest illustration of the poet, Sir John Gilbert’s vigorous dramatic illustrative designs being, of course, of much later date. Perhaps few of us would not have agreed with Lamb in his day. In our own day, however, we have come to look in book-illustration for something more than “maps, or modest remembrancers, to the text.” We are coming, in fact, if we have not already come, to demand of illustration that it shall not merely interpret for us the literary idea, or the mental image suggested by it, but that it shall do this with decorative effect--that it shall take its place upon the page with charm, dignity, and beauty. We are thus aiming at a higher standard of artistic book-illustration, which certain modern tendencies and achievements, as well as certain wider developments in the crafts of reproduction, have enabled us to conceive.