The poster used for the front cover of this book is, apart from its own intrinsic merit, a matter of historical interest, insomuch as it served as a figure in the notorious speech to the German National Assembly at Berlin on May 12, 1919, when the peace terms had been handed to the plenipotentiaries at Versailles. Herr Scheidemann in the course of his denunciation of the Allies' terms said: "Ladies and Gentlemen,--All over Berlin we see posters which are intended to arouse a practical love for our brothers in captivity; sad, hopeless faces behind prison bars. That is the proper frontispiece for the so-called Peace Treaty; that is the true portrait of Germany's future: sixty millions behind barbed wire and prison bars; sixty millions at hard labour, for whom the enemy will make their own land a prison camp." The Austrian poster artists, Krafter, Arpellus, and Puchinger, did important work, examples of which are reproduced in this book; but several of the Hungarian artists, in particular, did distinguished posters, as will be seen by a reference to illustration No. 41, that by Biró, No. 57, and the little group by Biró and Kurthy, Nos. 59, 61, and 62. V.--UNITED STATES OF AMERICA It is a commonplace to say that America is the true home of the advertisement agent; but in considering the history of poster art in the United States, one is surprised to find that so small a proportion of work done in the past shows any striking originality or real grip. In a country whose special capacity has seemed to consist in beating a very large drum repeatedly, often without much provocation, it was to be expected that the very bones and sinews of a poster should be understood, and that results of the highest order should have been obtained. Contrary to this expectation, only a small group of artists doing important work can be named as illustrating the best ability of the revival which, awaking with Chéret, Steinlen, and the others in France, spread to England, and thence normally to America. Of this group, the most able and important exponents of the art were often frankly derivative in their work. Will H. Bradley designed a number of posters which, with those of Penfield, may be said to have brought about the birth of poster art in the United States; but his most successful designs were openly based on the work of Aubrey Beardsley, the originality, charm, and extravagance of whose genius had recently taken the whole art world by storm. And Edward Penfield, whose pronounced ability seemed largely directed to the assimilation of different styles, produced posters excellent in their order, but most of them obvious work by a devoted and imaginative disciple of half a dozen schools varying during the long process of his development. We find him, for instance, producing an admirable American Steinlen in 1897, so clearly and frankly in Steinlen's spirit, yet with such artistic ability and undoubted