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As a boy, C.S. Lewis (or as he was always known to his friends, "Jack") had always drawn pictures for the stories he wrote. So when The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe was to be published, he did consider illustrating it himself, but eventually decided to use a professional artist. Pauline Baynes, a young illustrator then in her mid-twenties, had recently illustrated J.R.R. Tolkien's latest book, Farmer Giles of Ham, and Jack thought she might be just the person to cope with the variety of creatures and people in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.
 Although Jack had not given much thought to the way the illustrations would look, he had envisaged something rather grand. Pauline Baynes once said candidly, "If he'd had his way, they would have been full-colour plates by Arthur Rackham." It turned out that Pauline was to draw hundreds of wonderfully detailed black-and-white line drawings for the seven Chronicles of Narnia. In 1998 she added colour to every one of the approximately 350 original drawings, and these are the illustrations you see here today.
The relationship between Jack's stories and Pauline's illustrations was so successful that, right from the beginning, the words and pictures seemed to belong together. C.S. Lewis did send Pauline a sketch of what a Dufflepud should look like, but his descriptions of creatures and places were so detailed that she rarely had to refer to him for advice. When Pauline asked him how to draw a Marsh-wiggle, he replied, "Draw him however you like." She did, following Jack's description in the story, and that's how he's looked ever since!
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