Cricket and sport generally were never the main precoccupation of Vanity Fair, which was started as a satirical magazine, without illustrations, in 1868. The first cricketer, W. G. Grace, did not appear until 9 years later. The only sportsmen to appear before Grace were Captain Webb, in 1875, after swimming the channel, and the gymnast Captain Fred Burnaby (1876). About half the cricketers were drawn from the home counties -- Middlesex, Surrey, Kent and Essex -- and no professional was included until 1902. Of nearly 2,500 cartoons published before the magazine finally folded in 1914, only 32 were chosen primarily as cricketers. Nevertheless, the game had a better representation than any other sport in the magazine (horse-racing has the only double-figure sporting list), and were it not for its gallery of sportsmen who would remember Vanity Fair now? As individuals, the Vanity Fair cricketers will always be the object of facination. But they are equally important collectively as icons of cricket's and of England's halcyon years before 1914. "Apart from the delicate lithographs of the 1840s by Corbet Anderson, Basébé and Felix, it is doubtful if cricket, or any other English sport, has a more felicitous pictorial file of performers," writes John Arlott in his introduction to Russell March's book (p. 7). "The Vanity Fair drawings were skilfully executed by capable draughtsmen, and the colour-litho prints were technically extremely well made."