I own half a dozen books on improving your chess skills, and I’ve read (thanks to libraries) a couple dozen more. Among them, I doubt there has been a single illustration except chess positions and, possibly, photos of great chess players whose games are being referenced. In particular, I cannot think of a single picture of a “chess babe” in any of them (although chess magazines have indulged in the genre; paging Alexandra Kosteniuk).
I’ve also read a couple dozen books on the history of espionage, ranging from the Cambridge Five to the history of National Security Administration. Most of these books have a section of glossy pages in the middle that feature photos of prominent figures within the book, and possibly a couple of key locations. Those that discussed cryptography also had pictures of some related equipment; say, the the Nazis used to encode and decode messages using the “Enigma” cipher during World War II. I’ve never seen a gratuitous photo or illustration of a large-breasted woman stroking a gun barrel lovingly or sneaking along a corridor, though.
Even coffee table books, which are largely about collecting large numbers of attractive photos and illustrations, normally manage to be written around topics that justify all the eye-candy.
If you page through most roleplaying books from major publishers, though, you will see plenty mood pieces, and cheesecake is not that uncommon. Worse, when a game book does not have these kinds of illustrations, it is subject to comments like this one, which finally prodded me to write this post:
