When Aurel Stein arrived at the Mogao Caves in 1907, he knew a trove of literary treasures awaited him. The celebrated explorer and linguist had received word that a secret ‘Library Cave’ had been uncovered among the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas on the edge of the Gobi Desert and soon negotiated unprecedented access. There, Stein stumbled across something remarkable: a roughly six-thousand-word text bearing not only Chinese characters, but also an astonishing image of the Buddha and his pupil Subhūti attended by various followers.

The Diamond Sutra (868 BC) is the oldest printed and dated book in the world. Carved woodblocks were inked to produce intricate impressions of both devotional text and image. This surviving example was one of many copies designed for ‘free distribution’, as dictated by the man who commissioned the book, Wang Jie. The fact that such a seminal document combines an astute understanding of both pictorial and written language is proof that the intermingling of these two forms of ‘reading’ has held vital significance for centuries.

Reading Pictures, D B Dowd’s expansive chronicle of illustration’s rich history, takes this object as its starting point. The origins of print and its possibilities for dissemination, Dowd explains, were instrumental for an art form that is, at its heart, a communicative and commercial endeavour. He goes on to build