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The first Print run of these books was 10,000 and there are 40 volumes in each set. Each volume has 30 pictures in it so that is a total of 10,000x40x30 pictures = 12 million pictures. The pictures are printed in black and white but are then coloured in by hand! Try imagining that! Visitors often ask if they can see the books and we need to disappoint them by saying we cannot remove the Lucy books from the shelves and show them unless we are holding a book talk or exhibition. So we ordered duplicate copies of a few books that we could use as handling books. One of these was a bird book from this series, the same age as the Lucy book. This enabled me to answer the question if they really were hand coloured. We examined the same pictures in the handling book and in the Lucy book. If they were somehow copied or printed they would be identical but if they were hand painted there would be differences. There were indeed differences in paint intensity and filling against the black guide lines or overpainting which showed they really were hand painted. 12 million hand painted pictures in just this one series of books but at the same time the library contains many other hand painted books like the ones we have been looking at on costumes or maps. There was a whole army of colourists we know little about because nobody wrote a book about the people who painted books. I have seen it suggested they were mainly immigrant families with a lot living in Scotland and that everone in a family painted the book from the children to the grandparents.