At the turn of the century, America was increasingly urban, with a largely literate public. Now, for the first time, even factory workers were beginning to have some leisure time. Though a six-day workweek was long and tiring, it was still less work, and more money, than farming. One of the pleasures available if one had time but little money was literature. And good illustration helped sell magazines.

During the 19th Century, illustration played an increasingly important role in American culture. Demand for illustration, particularly in newspapers, increased significantly during the Civil War as civilians and others behind the front lines sought to keep up to date on events. Some illustrators worked in the field, sketching events as they occurred, and had drawings couriered back to their publishers. Others were armchair warriors, safely ensconced in New York, where they touched up the drawings of their colleagues at the front or created images based on battle dispatches. Photography at this point was less useful in documenting events because the photographer could only capture the before and after of a battle. In addition, equipment was cumbersome as was developing pictures in the field. As a result, photographs lacked the drama, and frequently the timeliness, of illustrations.

It was about the same time, in the 1860s, that the first books were printed with cover illustrations. In the early days of the United States there had been no international copyright agreements, and American publishers had freely reprinted favorite British and European authors. Because well-known books already had an audience, publishers had felt no need to take a chance on unknown American authors. In addition, books were published for the upper classes, more for display than reading. With large print, wide margins, high quality binding and prices of $1.00 to $1.50 each, they produced large profits. A popular

book might sell perhaps 20,000 copies. Illustration was in the form of line drawings and not regarded as particularly important.

In 1860, brothers Erastus and Irwin Beadle began publishing dime novels. With small print, small margins and cheap paper, they proved to be astonishingly successful. For the first time, Americans were reading stories by Americans about their own country – about the Revolutionary and Civil Wars and, especially popular, the taming of the American Frontier. Response was overwhelming. Dime novel No. 1, Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter, had everything: romance, danger, foreign (Indian) characters. Published in August 1860, it immediately sold 300,000 copies, fifteen times what was normally considered a good run.

Initially, the brothers did not go to the expense of putting illustrations on the covers of these books. But by late 1861, after the publication of Novel No. 28, The Maidens of the Forest: A Romance of the MickMacks, they decided to reissue the books with a cover illustration to differentiate them from the originals. Readers loved them and newsstands began to display them as selling tools. Dime novels were to provide excitement and entertainment to many a reader for the next 40 years. After the turn of the century, as new and higher quality magazines proliferated, these novels were to degenerate in quality, eventually becoming the "pulp" magazines of the 1920s and later. But they had started an extremely successful trend.

While books were becoming more accessible, magazines were also growing in popularity. In 1885, there were four general interest magazines with a circulation of over 100,000 all priced at $.35, a rather substantial sum. By 1905, Ladies’ Home Journal, Comfort, and Woman’s Magazine had a circulation of over a million each. Several others, including McCall’s Magazine, Good Housekeeping, and Cosmopolitan, had circulations almost as large. In addition, these magazines were now selling for $.10 and $.15 apiece. What had happened? Leisure time and a literate public had created the demand for reading material. What allowed publishers to satisfy that demand was the development of high-speed presses and the half-tone process for reproducing images.

Previously, the only means of printing images had been through the use of an image cut into a wood block where the parts not to be printed were cut away. In the late 18th century, Thomas Bewick, an English artist, developed the more refined technique of wood engraving, which was essentially the opposite of the woodcut. Now the parts that were to be printed were cut away, or carved using such techniques as cross-hatching. This technique provided significantly more detail in the final image. Copper plates also were used but engraving still presented a number of problems. The skill of engravers varied, and with or without intending to, the engraver could significantly change the artist’s drawing. In addition, all blocks wore down and prints became less and less clear as the block was used over and over. And engraving still ultimately restricted reproduced images to line drawings.

The development and patenting of the "half-tone" process in the 1890s, by Frederic Eugene Ives (no relation to lithographer James Merritt Ives) opened up great new possibilities. Half-tone printing involved photographing an image. The photograph was made of tiny dots which could create the illusion of a much wider range of tones – from black to white to shades of gray. The photograph was then used in the printing of the publication. The half-tone process allowed artists to use other media, including color oils, grisaille (black and white) and watercolors, knowing that the details of their paintings would be accurately reproduced. Not only was half-tone able to reproduce more accurately, it was substantially less expensive than engraving. A black and white halftone illustration would cost about $20; a comparable wood engraving could cost $300 – and take as much as two weeks longer. [4] Printing in color soon became possible, but was substantially more expensive; full color was not to become economically practicable until the 1930s. (The Saturday Evening Post, for example, used a two–color process for its covers until 1923.) The half-tone process was hard to improve upon and was used for most book illustrations up to the 1960s.