Illustrated book

“ From the paper cover (which you removed from the book before binding it) cut the title, and, with glue, apply it to the front cover near the top, as shown in the illustration of the finished book (Fig. 11) . If the back title has been preserved that can be pasted along the back.
How to Extra-illustrate a Book
Every one knows how much more interesting is an illustrated book than one without pictures. What a satisfaction it would be to us if we could illustrate our favorite books ourselves! What pleasure we would take in it! This [198] is entirely possible. ”

“ Then reappeared, following the new processes, the figures somewhat abandoned by the Mayence workmen during the period of transformation. Our object is to speak at length of the Book ornamented and illustrated according to the means of relief-cutting or casting; to demonstrate the influence of painting, of sculpture, of art, on the production of the Book; and thus to help the reader at the same time to understand the almost sudden and irresistible development of typography, and to mention its foremost representatives. ”

“ Every book ought to be illustrated in the spirit and costume of its time. The book should not be stuffed too full of prints; let a better proportion be preserved between the text and the illustrations than Falstaff observed between his bread and his sack. ”

“ CHAPTER II. OF THE TRANSITION, AND OF THE SECOND PERIOD OF DECORATIVELY ILLUSTRATED BOOKS, FROM THE INVENTION OF PRINTING IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY ONWARDS.
e have seen to what a pitch of perfection and magnificence the decoration and illustration of books attained during the Middle Ages, and the splendid results to which art in the three distinct forms—calligraphy, illumination, and miniature—contributed. We have traced a gradual progression and evolution of style through the period of MS. books, both in the development of writing and ornament. ”

“ He gave particular attention to illustrated books, securing the service of a number of noteworthy designers and engravers, and ornamenting his books, not only with full-page illustrations, but with elaborate initial letters and head- and tail-pieces. ”

“ Each of the twenty tales is illustrated with a magnificent color plate by a celebrated artist. It is one of the finest books ever published for children, telling them in simple language, which is as nearly like that of Shakespeare as possible, the stories of the great plays. The subjects for the illustrations were posed in costumes of the nation and time in which each story is set and are unrivaled in rich color, lively drawing and dramatic interest. 320 pages. 20 full-page color plates.
Fairy Tales Of All Nations By LOGAN MARSHALL
The most beautiful book of fairy tales ever published. ”

“ But this is a thing that can rarely be done, and what we want, it seems to me, is, not that books should sometimes be beautiful, but that they should generally be beautiful; indeed, if they are not, it increases the difficulties of those who would make them sometimes beautiful immensely. At any rate, I claim that illustrated books should always be beautiful, unless, perhaps, where the illustrations are present rather for the purpose of giving information than for that of giving pleasure to the intellect through the eye ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the last quarter of a century our decorative work has improved in the most striking manner; our illustrations, if judged merely for their pictorial qualities, have not advanced. In the eyes of artists the sketches for book-work now being produced in other countries are probably as good as our own. But an illustration is not merely a picture, it is a picture to be placed in a certain position in a printed book, and in due relation to the size of the page and the character of the type. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The illustrations are all designed with as truly poetic a spirit as the poem itself breathes, and all are presented in the very highest style of the engraver's art. To say that a book is a 'picture book' is usually to imply something rather derogatory to its character for value in other respects. ”

“ I think that book illustration should be something more than a collection of accidental sketches. Since one cannot ignore the constructive organic element in the formation—the idea of the book itself—it is so far inartistic to leave it out of account in designing work intended to form an essential or integral part of that book. ”

“ There is nothing more variegated in its colour than a large assemblage of children’s books; the cover-designers revel in their rainbow conceits, sprinkling gold across the cloth as generously as fairies scatter star-dust; the artists fill their brushes with delicate tints of red and blue and orange, and sketch the progress of a story in spiral traceries of imagination. The mechanical perfection of book-making is genuinely pleasing ”

“ In no other part of the subject of book-illustration are the books of yesterday fraught with charm so inimical to delight in the books of to-day. The modern child's book—except, let us hope, to the child-owner—is merely a book as other books are. Its qualities are as patent as its size, or number of illustrations. The pictures are to the credit or discredit of a known and realized artist ”

“ It is a comparatively easy matter to illustrate a book, or, in the case of a book that already contains pictures, to extend and increase the illustration by means of old prints, engravings, and pictures gathered from various sources, and bound in with the leaves of the book. ”

“ No part of a book is more significant to the child than the illustrations. In preparing the illustrations for this series as great pains have been taken to furnish the child with ideas that will guide him in his practical activities as to illustrate the text itself.
Mr. Howard V. Brown, the artist who executed the drawings, has been aided in his search for authentic originals by the late J. W. Powell, director of the United States Bureau of Ethnology, Washington, D.C.; by Frederick J. V. Skiff, director of the Field Columbian Museum, Chicago, and by the author. ”

“ On the other hand each contributory craft may usurp the functions of the rest & of the whole and growing beautiful beyond all bounds ruin for its own the common cause. I propose in this brief essay, putting aside for the moment the material, paper or vellum, the binding & decoration, & the literary content of the Book Beautiful, to say a few words on the artistic treatment of the vehicle of expression—Calligraphy, Printing, & Illustration—and on the Book Beautiful as a whole. ”

“ In fact, unpopular though it may be to project such a theory, one fancies that the real educational power of the picture-book is upon the elders, and thus, that it undoubtedly helps to raise the standard of domestic taste in art. But, on the other hand, whether his art is adequately appreciated or not, what an unprejudiced and wholly spontaneous acclaim awaits the artist who gives his best to the little ones! ”

“ The author says, “About fifty of the most famous names in painting have been chosen for discussion, ranging from the renaissance down to the present day, unfolding the gradual progress of art, and indicating the motives which have influenced artists as great schools have arisen in one country after another. ... The illustrations have been selected from great artists, but of subjects not yet too well known, and hence they offer material for study.” There are sixteen illustrations. A short bibliography is provided at the end and there is an index. ”

“ The value of the illustrations can scarcely be over-estimated. They will be found to surpass in number and excellence anything heretofore offered in a school-book. For the most part they are reproductions of world-famous pictures, and for that reason the artists’ names are generally affixed. ”

“ The question, in fact, which I want to put to you is this, Whether we are to have books which are beautiful as books; books in which type, paper, woodcuts, and the due arrangement of all these are to be considered, and which are so treated as to produce a harmonious whole, something which will give a person with a sense of beauty real pleasure whenever and wherever the book is opened, even before he begins to look closely into the illustrations ”

“ It is so seldom that an artist is able to take in hand what may be termed the entire decoration of a book—including in that phrase cover, illustration, colophon, head- and tail-pieces, initial letters, and borders—that it is a pleasure to find in the subject of our paper a lady who may be said to be capable of taking all these points into consideration in the embellishment of a volume. ”

“ The open-air illustrator represents another aspect of illustration. To interpret the spirit of the text would, frequently, allow his art no exercise. Much of his text is itinerary. [Pg 57] His subject is before his eyes in actuality, or in photographs, and not in some phrase of words, magical with suggested forms, creating by its gift of delight desire to celebrate its beauty. Still, if the artist be independent of the intellectual and imaginative qualities of the book, his is no independent form of black and white. It is illustration; the author's subject is the subject of the artist. ”

“ The little sketches and woodcuts are trifling as illustrations, and can only assist the memory and the fancy of the reader but I regret this the less, inasmuch as those who take an interest in the subject can easily illustrate the book for themselves. To collect a portfolio of prints, including those works of art which are cited under each head as examples, with a selection from the hundreds of others which are not cited, and arrange them in the same order—with reference, not to schools, or styles, or dates, but to subject merely—would be an amusing, and I think not a profitless, occupation. ”

“ That modern children's books will—some of them at least—take an honourable place in an iconography of nineteenth-century art, many of the illustrations here reproduced are in themselves sufficient to prove. ”

“ Book-illustration, which had offered to the humble makers of playing-cards and pictures of saints new scope for their skill, became to the artists of the sixteenth century a lightly valued method of earning a little money from the booksellers, their better work being reserved for single designs, or in some cases for the copperplates which at first they executed, as well as drew, themselves. ”

“ It is an understood fact that illustration, in this present, is a decided factor in commercial and literary progress, proving that adults as well as children are influenced by pictures, and that the fine arts no less than the liberal arts have a mission beyond beauty, even a didactic use. ”

“ Something which excites the imagination invariably challenges interest, and the illustrator who is true to his calling and above shirking his task enhances the interesting features of a book a thousand fold, if he spares no pains in arriving at an actual expression of the author's intention. ”

“ Like all volumes of the New Art Library, thorough in its teaching, eminently practical in its manner of presenting it, and so splendidly illustrated that not a rule is laid down or a piece of advice given but what a drawing accompanies it. ”

“ Years before good picture-books there were good stories, and these, whether they be the classics of the nursery, the laureates of its rhyme, the unknown author of its sagas, the born story-tellers—whether they date from prehistoric cave-dwellers, or are of our own age, like Charles Kingsley or Lewis Carroll—supply the text to spur on the artist to his best achievements. ”

“ For the traditions of art and of race that find a focus in the illustrative etchings of this artist, the creative traditions, and instinctive modes of thought that are represented in the forms and formation of his art, are forces of intellect and passion and insight not previously, nor now, by more than the one artist, associated with the practice of illustration. ”

“ We may, however, find illustration ascending a step higher towards the sphere of art proper and creative, and that is in the edition de luxe, in which, with or without printed matter, we have plates which are pictures in the best sense, and appeal chiefly, or exclusively, to the æsthetic sense. Also in some dramatic works, in poetry, and in some prose, there is a much wider scope for the imagination of the artist, and we have high-class books of a real artistic merit. ”

“ The pages of almost all books, from the 8th to the 15th century, are beautiful, even without the addition of ornament. In those that are ornamented without pictures illustrative of the text, the eye is so pleasured, and the fancy so tickled by the beauty and exhaustless cheerful invention of the illuminator, that one scarcely ventures to ask that the tale embodied in the written characters should be further illustrated. ”

“ But drawing, pursued as an introduction to the world of art, may lead the student on through a course of practically endless evolution and development, as he perceives that it is indeed a language of a most sensitive and varied kind, of many styles and methods, which, though beginning with simple statements of fact and form, may become in gifted hands an instrument of the most powerful or delicate feeling and an exponent of character and a vehicle of the imagination, having a rhythm and beauty peculiar to itself. ”