The Illustrated London News was the world's first illustrated weekly newspaper. Established by Nottingham bookseller and newsagent Herbert Ingram, the paper focused on popular, bankable stories: crime, war, tragedy, celebrity and royalty, as well as theatre and book reviews and listings of births, deaths and marriages. The inaugural issue, published on 14 May 1842, featured a double-page spread on Queen Victoria's first masquerade ball, illustrated with wood engravings. The 1852 special edition covering the funeral of the Duke of Wellington had a circulation of 150,000 copies, and by 1863 the circulation had increased to 300,000 copies per week. During the early 1860s, the publishers of the ILN acquired additional titles and established new publications including the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, The Lady's Pictorial and The Sketch. Renowned for its print quality and dramatic illustrations, many of which were worked up by artists in London from rough sketches and accounts of distant events and scenes, the ILS helped to establish the careers of many graphic artists. From around 1890 issues increasingly featured photography; by the 1930s, most of the pictures in the paper were photographic. The 1942 centenary edition, though produced amid wartime austerity, boasted a suite of specially commissioned colour photographs of the royal family. Many illustrated newspapers ceased publication in the years following the Second World War as the wireless and cheaper, daily papers gained a monopoly on reporting of the news. The ILN's parent company, Illustrated News Ltd., was sold to a Canadian media mogul in 1961; in 1971, with circulation dwindling further, the paper moved from weekly to monthly publication. Its frequency was gradually reduced further to four and then two issues per year, and it ceased publication entirely in 2003.
