500 YEARS OF ART AND ILLUSTRATION

This is a lot for the money, and should prove good merchandise. In one large volume, the survey of 500 years of art as applied to illustration is brought together. The test is necessarily very brief, nonfined largely to captions, with occasionally single page biographical sketches, or notes on period developments. With the old masters (Durer, Boys, William Morris, Beardsley) as background, the development comes up to today's illustrators, people like Wanda Gag and Henry Pitz. The value of a book of this kind is that it gives the uninitiate a birdseye view of an entire field, and should lead to more intelligent evaluation. To the initiate, it serves as a reminder, high-spotting successive types, and showing interrelationship of periods, countries and schools. It is not a substitute for more serious, scholarly studies, nor for fine art books. But it is a useful quicky.