READING PICTURES

Revealing the impact of images.

Dowd, faculty director of the Dowd Illustration Research Archive at Washington University in St. Louis, offers a wide-ranging global history of illustration, from ancient Chinese and Japanese woodcuts to contemporary websites, from the scroll to the meme. Focusing on North America, Europe, and East Asia, he investigates the interaction between text and image, asking how illustration contributes to reading experiences. Access to reading increased in the 19th century, with the rise of literacy rates that led to the popularity of novels. To the surprise of publishers—and authors—embellished volumes sold better than those that contained only text. Illustrators became newly in demand, both for books and magazines, where novels often were serialized. Magazine and newspaper editors also hired illustrators, and by the mid-19th century, photographers, to provide images for reporting on everyday life and exceptional events. From 1870 to 1940, a burgeoning consumer society meant a surge in advertising, with words and images aimed at luring customers and shaping public taste. The artists producing those images, though, were largely anonymous, except for a “small handful of celebrity illustrators” who signed their work. From package labels to posters, a “visual culture of publicity” initiated “a hybrid form of reading.” Dowd examines the cultural power of caricature, comics, and cartooning; wartime propaganda; images associated with race, ethnicity, and gender; and the messages conveyed in much turn-of-the-century children’s literature, which “drank from the cup of colonialism and racial animus.” He considers the graphic novel, “the most significant event in illustrated fiction for adults since the midcentury.” The lavishly illustrated volume contains over 400 images, explicated by the author’s detailed captions; each image is attributed, where possible, to its creator. Although Dowd demurs in calling his project encyclopedic, it is impressively capacious.

Lively, authoritative intellectual history.