Of the Decorative Illustration of Books Old and New
The pattern
This still is filed under Craft-argument book.
Define
A book or manual that sells a method by arguing it. Chapters as proof, not as decoration around a product.
Mechanism
Authority by treatise. The reader who accepts the argument has already accepted the seller as teacher.
Verdict
We can teach a craft in public and the teaching is the funnel.
Why it works
Crane proves a claim about page design by making the book a controlled experiment: identical frames, identical caption structure, four centuries of examples, so the reader compares treatments rather than admiring pictures. Putting the running head as the artist or school turns each spread into an attributed exhibit and makes the book usable as a reference at speed. The argument is stated once in the preface as a distinction, the art of pictorial statement against the art of decorative treatment, and every plate afterwards is sorted by that single test. The restrained cover, one corner of drawn ornament against bare cloth, demonstrates the thesis on the object itself before the reader opens it.
Steal this when
You are arguing that one way of doing the work is better than another and you have examples from both camps. Standardise the mount and the caption, put them in one sequence, and let the comparison make the case instead of the prose.