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.