The use of prints to illustrate books was one branch of a wide-ranging business in the production of printed pictures. Away from the context of books, prints are usually thought of as decorative objects, but in the eighteenth century many were made for practical use. Throughout the long eighteenth century, specialists in printed pictures controlled their trade. Booksellers never dominated the business of printed pictures, although their interests frequently overlapped with those of printsellers. Booksellers occasionally published prints and London booksellers frequently helped with the distribution of prints, especially with expensive sets where a wide sale was needed to recover costs. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, most fine prints and books of prints were imported from abroad, chiefly from France and Italy. Large numbers of imported prints were advertised in the newspapers after the cessation of hostilities with France around 1711, and huge quantities of foreign prints continued to flood the British market for many years.

The nineteenth century brought illustrated books and periodicals to large sectors of the British population for the first time. The first serious efforts to bring large numbers of illustrated publications within the pockets of ordinary readers were made in Britain in the 1830s with the rise of pictorial journals, particularly the Penny Magazine. The measure of the progress of illustration in nineteenth-century Britain is provided by pictures in popular periodicals. The astonishing growth of illustration in nineteenth-century periodicals was echoed in some categories of book publishing, though less dramatically. In the late eighteenth century two developments paved the way for the rapid increase in illustrative material. They are Thomas Bewick's refinements to the process of producing relief prints from wood, and Alois Senefelder's invention of the planographic process of lithography in Germany in 1798/9. Several approaches were adopted for the production of photographic illustrations in books before the development of photomechanical relief blocks in the closing decades of the century.