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Poems, novels and plays have given artists scenes to picture and characters to inhabit. Sandro Botticelli made a long series of drawings for Dante's Divine Comedy in the 1480s and 1490s, and Eugène Delacroix's lithographs for Goethe's Faust (1828) set a tone for Romantic illustration. John William Waterhouse's The Lady of Shalott (1888) follows Tennyson's heroine as she drifts downstream toward her death.

In Japan, Utagawa Kuniyoshi made his name around 1827 with prints of the heroes of the Chinese novel Water Margin, bristling with tattoos and weapons. Illustrators brought books to generations of young readers: N. C. Wyeth painted pirates for a 1911 edition of Treasure Island, and Maurice Sendak wrote and drew Where the Wild Things Are (1963). Some artists treat the book as raw material. Tom Phillips spent decades painting over the pages of a little-known Victorian novel, leaving selected words to form A Humument (begun 1966).