ILLUSTRATION
ILLUSTRATION, the other expressive constituent of the Book Beautiful, is a part of the whole subject matter, in process of symbolical communication, picked out, isolated, & presented pictorially. Besides its relation in the field of the imagination to the rest of the subject matter, the thought of the book, it has a relation & a most important relation, in the field of the senses, to the vehicle of communication, the immediate typographical environment, amid which it appears. And here comes in the question, which has sometimes been confused with the question of relationship, the question of the mode in which the pictorial illustration may be produced & transferred to the page, by woodcut, by steel or copper engraving, or by process. But this seems to me to be an entirely subordinate though important question. The main question is the aspect which the illustration shall be made to take in order to fit it into and amid a page of Typography. And I submit that its aspect must be essentially formal and of the same texture, so to speak, as the letterpress. It should have a set frame or margin to itself, demarcating it distinctly from the text, and the shape & character of the frame, if decorative, should have relation to the page as well as to the illustrative content; and the illustrative content itself should be formal and kept under so as literally to illustrate, and not to dim by over brilliancy the rest of the subject matter left to be communicated to the imagination by the letterpress alone.