British Film Posters, the first complete history of British film posters ever published, covers every aspect of design, printing, and display, and includes detailed biographies of all the major artists. The book explores illustrated film posters from their emergence in the late Victorian period as an offshoot of the variety/theatrical posters of the period, to the rapid decline of the illustrated, or handpainted, tradition in the mid-1980s, and to the subsequent arrival of computer desktop publishing. The overall theme of the book is that vintage film posters represent a significant and coherent movement in British popular art of the twentieth century, which has until now been overlooked and undocumented.