Beyond the lines

"Today video clips and photojournalism dominate our news sources, but in the second half of the nineteenth century, the pictorial newspaper brought events and personalities alive for a hungry public. In this wonderfully illustrated book, Joshua Brown shows that the wood engravings in the illustrated newspapers of Gilded Age America were more than quaint predecessors to our own sophisticated media. As he tells the history and traces the influence of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, with relevant asides on Harper's Weekly, the New York Daily Graphic and others, Brown recaptures the…