This book, the standard work and a mammoth task of collection by Brian Reade, provides the public with the opportunity to see virtually the entire collection of Beardsley's mature work, culled from a wide variety of sources, thus enabling the collector to distinguish between the genuine Beardsley and the hundreds of spurious pastiches attributed to him. This superb assembly of the work of one of Britain's greatest masters of line drawing is now reissued by the Antique Collectors' Club.

Aubrey Beardsley was once popularly described as a disciple of evil and identified with the 'decadent' excesses of Oscar Wilde. Indeed, it is possible to see in the intense sensuous drawings he produced during his brief working life, some connection with the character of Wilde's Dorian Gray.

Interest in Beardsley's work was revived in the mid-'sixties with a retrospective exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum and similar ones held in New York at the Gallery of Modern Art and at the County Museum, Los Angeles. Perhaps the key to his great popularity is his consummate ability with line and shape and his use of space. He did not need to express himself in colour — his defiant personality projected itself in black and white, not in three-dimensional realism. If some of his contemporaries saw it differently, `the mere glorification of a hideous and putrescent aspect of modern life', the fact remains he is now regarded as an artist draughtsman of brilliant invention.