📚 Book Illustration

The drawn page: illustrators and their publishers, and the visual layer many readers grew up inside.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject illustration of books in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam	Omar Khayyam	1859	149
	The Library	Andrew Lang	1881	64
	India's love lyrics	Laurence Hope	1902	24
	Pen drawing and pen draughtsmen, their work and their methods	Joseph Pennell	1889	19
	Leonor Fini	Leonor Fini	1965	19
	The illustration of books	Joseph Pennell	1895	17
	The art nouveau book in Britain	John Russell Taylor	1966	10
	Dorothea Tanning	Dorothea Tanning	1974	10
	English caricaturists and graphic humourists of the nineteenth century	Graham Everitt	1886	9
	Tennyson and his pre-Raphaelite illustrators	Layard, George Somes	1894	9
	Creative illustration	Andrew Loomis	1947	9
	Antoni Tàpies	Antoni Tàpies	1967	9
	Jazz	Henri Matisse	1947	8
	The illustration of books	David Bland	1951	7
	American Illustration	American Illustration Staff	1993	7
	Sixty-three unpublished designs	Claud Lovat Fraser	1924	6
	Picture this	Molly Bang	1991	6
	The art of Eric Carle	Eric Carle	1993	6
	Illustration	Alan Male	2014	6
	The fables of Aesop	Aesop	1867	5
	Aquatint engraving	S. T. Prideaux	1909	5
	Die altdeutsche Buchillustration	Wilhelm Worringer	1912	5
	Charles Eisen	Vera Salomons	1914	5
	The new book-illustration in France	Léon Pichon	1924	5
	Der Sandmann	E. T. A. Hoffmann	1925	5
	Technical illustration	T. A. Thomas	1960	5
	Drawing for illustration	Lynton Lamb	1962	5
	The illustrated book	Diana Klemin	1970	5
	The Fantastic Kingdom	David Larkin	1974	5
	Fantasy	Brigid Peppin	1975	5

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 03 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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Want the ideas behind these books explained rather than listed? Try Study for short explainers, Academy for deeper tracks, and the periodic table or the night sky when the book is about matter or stars.