The importance of illustration

Back, long ago, in the days of pulp fiction and fifty cent novels, illustration was king. There was a reason for this. People, in general, are drawn to beautiful things. Granted beauty can be subjective for each individual from a splatter of black and white on an austere surface all the way upwards to a grandiloquent baroque-like tapestry of color and form grafted to a forty-foot plaster wall. In the case of the novel and short story, publishers from long ago understood this concept.