In late antiquity, the Scriptoria and the libraries of the monasteries became centers of knowledge, writing and education passing from the elite of the Roman Empire into the hands of the Church.
The establishment of universities, starting with the twelfth century, and the flourishing culture on European royal courts created new values of writing and bibliology.
With the spread of printing, in the fifteenth century, secular texts and those that cultivated the fine arts, as well as popular literature, changed the nature of a culture dominated by handwritten documents.
Book illustration, as we know it today, was born in the nineteenth century, with the spread of children's books, in the twentieth century the names of famous artists signing illustrations or ex libris.