The Private Library

The Wild West and The Private Library (Part I)

If there is a better example of modern mythmaking than the settlement of the American frontier, such does not immediately come to mind. 

We glimpsed a tiny bit of this mythmaking in our series on the western (see our posts of 25-29 June 2009). This mythmaking has so overshadowed what really happened in those bad old "good old days," that scholars' attempts to restore accuracy and balance to the historical record have often been overlooked:

Over the next several posts, we will examine a wide range of nonfiction that seeks to restore that balance.  We will look at books about Manifest Destiny and The Great Reconnaissance; books about The Trail of Tears and Dred Scott; books about land rushes and gold rushes; books about maltreatment of Indians and the "heathen Chinese;" books about scientific surveys and exploration, the Louisiana Purchase, the Pony Express and the coming of the railroad.  And all of this will be but the teeniest, tiniest tip of the iceberg as to what's actually available in the marketplace around which to construct a private library devoted to The Wild West.

As the acclaimed revisionist cable TV series Deadwood made clear, it wasn't all rugged cowboys coming to the aid of damsels in distress.  While there were indeed magnificent discoveries, great feats of bravery and successful struggles against enormous odds, there also was not a little treachery and deceit, foul deals as often as fair, murderous rage in place of reasoned discourse.  Should be interesting....

Possession and The Private Library

It’s all rather cold and unromantic. There was no feeling of excitement as I opened the front cover for the first time (there was no front cover), nowhere to indulge the jealous desire to pen my name onto the first page, to take possession of the book and make it my own.

David Shone's encounter with a Sony Portable Reader at the British Library speaks profoundly to the disenchantment that many book collectors experience when encountering electronic books.  So, too, does Shone's further observation:

Given that much of the demand for the Kindle, Amazon’s answer to the e-book, is being driven by the romance and erotic romance, one might be tempted to observe that someone looking to read Lori Foster’s Real Men Last All Night would probably feel let down by a battery that doesn’t.

Possession.  Always on access.  Is this what the great battle between real books and electronic books ultimately boils down to? 

We decided to cruise the Internet in search of answers.  Here's a little bit of what we found....

• On Owning Books
• Books Do Furnish a Life
• Kindle DRM's the Death of Scholarship?
• The Pleasure and Pain of Owning Books
  
• The Freedom of Not Owning Books

Following the Flag in your Private Library

As noted in our series of posts about First Editions (15-17 June 2009), the term First Edition means many different things to collectors and to booksellers, the traditional verities of ABC for Book Collectors and similar works notwithstanding.  We saw in that series of posts some of the ludicrous paths down which the term First Edition can lead, given the respective interests of booksellers and book collectors.

Today, we examine in more detail one of those paths: the meaning of follow the flag with respect to definitions of First Edition.

Traditionally, there have been two competing definitions of the term follow the flag.  One definition posits that, irrespective of where an author's book made its first appearance in book form, one might wish to collect only that edition that made its first appearance in book form in the author's country of birth.  This definition has longed posed problems for many booksellers and book collectors.  How does one follow the flag (in this definition) with an author like the Nobel Laureate Sir V. S. Naipaul, who was born in Trinidad (which admittedly has many charms, but is not a noted center of publishing) but who has spent most of his life in England (which is a center of publishing).

A competing definition of follow the flag suggests that one should collect editions that represent an author's first appearance in book form in the country where one lives.  This definition makes collectors much happier, because they can collect First Editions that often are substantially less expensive than the true First Edition.  A case in point is Thomas Keneally's well-received account of Oskar Shindler:

 

Keneally is Australian, so an Australian collector following the flag is most likely going to want the First Australian Edition (above left) for his or her collection.  An American book collector following the flag likely would be more interested in the First American Edition (above right--notice the title change). Neither of the above is the true First Edition, which was published in London in 1982:

Collectors of ARCs (see our post of 25 October 2009) beg to differ altogether....

Movable Books and The Private Library (Part VI)

In the 1960s a Los Angeles-based print brokerage firm, Graphics International, which had been creating pop-up magazine ad inserts for company's like Dodge and Wrigley's, tried to market Atria's pop-up books in the USA (see yesterday's post).  Thwarted from doing so by Czechoslovakia's Communist authorities, the company's president, Waldo Hunt, had the firm begin publishing its own line of pop-up books.  Thus began the second golden age of movable books....

Hunt's firm moved to New York in 1964 and began producing books for Random House.  The first publication produced by this partnership was Bennett Cerf's pop-up riddles (1965), a promotion for Maxwell House Coffee (which the company's customers could receive "by sending in two can labels and $1").  Some thirty additional movable books were published for Random House within the next two years:

Hunt had developed a considerable number of international contacts as a print broker, and he was able to use these contacts to have his movable books assembled in countries where the enormous hand labor required to produce such books was less expensive than in the United States.  Initially, he had this work done in Japan, then later in Mexico, Colombia and Singapore.

Hunt sold Graphics International to Hallmark at the end of the 1960s, and Hallmark moved the firm to Kansas City (Missouri), where the firm produced an additional forty+ movable books.  In 1974, Hunt left the company and returned to California, where he founded the book packaging company Intervisual Communications and the publisher Intervisual Books (now part of Dalmatian Press).  Over the next quarter century Hunt's companies would dominate movable books, marketing over 25 million copies, available in over 1000 titles (including some 150+ titles for Disney).  Among Hunt's personal favorites of these titles was Haunted House, a 1979 bestseller for children featuring six complicated pop-ups designed by famed paper engineer Jan Pienkowski:

Hunt also was largely responsible for the renaissance in adult movable books, and among his personal favorites was Andy Warhol's Index (1967):

A collector, as well as a publisher, of movable books, Hunt donated some 500 antique movable books to UCLA.  Sadly, Waldo Hunt passed away earlier this month (6 November 2009), just three weeks shy of his 89th birthday.  You can read a tribute here.

Today's movable books, which utilize sophisticated, systematized construction techniques (though still very much reliant on hand labor for the final product), has made superstars of paper engineers like David Carter...

 

...John Strejan (who passed away in 2003)...

 

...Robert Sabuda...

 

...and a host of other talented paper engineers from around the world (Fernando Ferreras Arguello, a sample of whose work is depicted below, is from Spain):

    

The earliest movable books, from the first golden age of such books in the 19th century, are very rare, especially in anything approaching Fine condition (as noted previously, hard usage by generations of children has taken its toll).  On the infrequent occasions when these movables become available in the marketplace, they nearly always command substantial premiums.

On the other hand, today's movables can frequently be picked up for just a few dollars at your local yard sale, garage sale, friends-of-the-library book sale and the like.  The caveat here is condition, condition, condition....make sure the book you're purchasing has all its moving parts, and that all such parts are in working order.  To help you in your quest for such treasures, you may want to arm yourself with Ann Montanaro's bibliographies, as well as one or more of the following titles...

    

Whether you collect movables for children, or movables for adults, or both, your private library will likely be a much happier place....

Movable Books and The Private Library (Part V)

At the conclusion of World War I, over a decade passed before movable books for children began to again be published in any quantity.  British publisher S. Louis Giraud began publishing in 1929 a series of movable books that he labeled living models.  These were true pop-ups, moderately priced (unlike their predecessors of the 19th century), and over the next two decades Giraud would publish sixteen annuals, each of which included at least five pop-ups:

 
The first American movable books had been published during the 1880s by McLoughlin Brothers of New York in what they termed their Little Showman's Series: 

The firm is perhaps better known, though, for pirating Dean & Son's Pantomine Toy Books (see our post of 23 November 2009).  The firm had little more to do with movable books until 1939, as we shall see shortly.

The worldwide Great Depression of the 1930s sent book buying, like most other economic activities, into a long and precipitous decline.  Seeking to resurrect their fortunes, the Blue Ribbon Publishing Company of New York hit upon a winning combination: a series of movable books for children inspired by traditional fairy tales, as well as by the animation of the Walt Disney Company:

 

It was near the end of this decade that McLoughlin Brothers re-entered the market for children's movable books, publishing their famous Jolly Jump-Up Series.  As a recent exhibition at the University of Virginia observes, this series' themes of family life--buying a new home, going camping, visiting the farm--trace the family from the end of the 1930s through the post-World War II boom. Over time, the Jump-Ups came to encapsulate the American dream:

The 1940s saw the advent of a number of remarkable paper engineers such as Julian Wehr, who designed books with tabs that were located at the sides of books (not just at the bottom, as in previous decades), and which could often be moved back and forth as well as up and down:

 

In the 1950s Bancroft & Co. (London) began marketing an innovative series of movable books produced by, believe it or not, a state-run import/export agency (Artia) in Czechoslovakia.  These books were largely the work of the extraordinarily talented paper engineer and artist Vojtêch Kubašta:

 

The second golden age of movable books for children was about to begin....

Movable Books and The Private Library (Part IV)

Dean & Sons pre-eminence in publishing movable books was not seriously challenged until Rafael Tuck founded (in 1870) his London enterprise to produce luxury paper items like puzzles, valentines and paper dolls.  Although better known for his firm's production of exquisite chromolithographed postcards (printed in Germany), the firm also published Father Tuck's Mechanical Series (1890), which featured several different mechanisms over the course of the series (e.g., transformationals, such as Pleasure Pages, depicted below), and a series of pop-ups like Fun at the Circus, also depicted below:

    

At about the same time (1877), Ernest Nister founded a publishing firm that would find a way to create pop-ups that stood up automatically (scenes would not have to be lifted up or pulled down manually). These were the firm's celebrated Panorama Picture Books, one of which--Wild Animal Stories--is depicted below.  His firm also refined the transformational book with its dissolving picture books, which featured "a mechanism that would reveal pictures in a circular form, creating a kaleidoscope effect," as in Magic Windows, also depicted below: 

     

Even more than for their mechanical innovations, though, Nister's movable books are renowned for their "exquisite sentimental beauty," a sentimentality that was quite popular with Victorian book buyers:

    

Nister published movable books for the continental European market from his firm's headquarters in Nuremburg, and for the English book market from his firm's headquarters in London and through a partnership with the American publisher E. P. Dutton.

The above innovations notwithstanding, it was the comic vision of the great Munich artist Lothar Meggendorfer that would have the greatest influence on the development of movable books.  His movables feature some of the most complex mechanisms ever devised for such books, actuated by an innovative series of rivets and levers.  (To see one of his firm's movable books in action, click here.)  As Ann Montanaro has noted, [Meggendorfer] used tiny metal rivets, actually tight curls of thin copper wire, to attach the levers, so that a single pull-tab could activate all of them, often with several delayed actions as the tab was pulled further out. Some illustrations used more than a dozen rivets.

Meggendorfer created his first movable book, Living Pictures (1878), as a Christmas present for his son, Adolf. While his earliest movable books often were hand-painted (such as Immer Lustig, depicted below), later movables usually featured exquisite chromolithography (such as Comic Actors, also depicted below):

    

All of the movables from this first golden age of movable books are understandably quite rare, especially in anything like Fine condition.  Decades of hard use by children have taken their toll, as Meggendorfer's movables often cautioned children that it would, as in these lines from Comic Actors:

The men and creatures here you find
Are lively and amusing,
Your fingers must be slow and kind
And treat them well while using.

All movable books, even today, require an enormous amount of hand labor, and the coming of World War I would remove most of that skilled labor from the marketplace....

 

Movable Books and The Private Library (Part III)

Mass production of movable books for children did not begin until around the middle of the 19th century, when the London publisher Dean & Son began to produce its now famous and coveted series of New Scenic Books. 

These were the first movable books that probably would be considered pop-up books in the sense that this word is used today.  As noted in a recent University of North Texas exhibition of such books,

[e]ach was illustrated on at least three cut-out sections. The sections were placed one behind another and attached by a ribbon running through them. This way, they could stay together and be folded flat as flaps, face down against a page. When a reader lifted a flap, a three-dimensional scene would actually pop-up! 

During the period from roughly 1860-1900, Dean & Son produced some fifty such books, in the process introducing several innovations to the production of movable books. 

In the 1860s the company perfected a means of animating parts of a book with a tab mechanism, which they advertised as living pictures.  Their Royal Punch & Judy as Played before the Queen at Windsor Castle & the Crystal Palace (published in 1861 and based on the somewhat anarchic Punch & Judy puppet shows that were a favorite of Victorian audiences) is a well-known example:

 

Another popular Dean & Son series, Home Pantomime Toy Books, is almost as famous for its gorgeous chromolithographs (see our posts of 14-16 November 2009) as for its animation, which effect was created by layering pages of different sizes upon each other (as the pages are turned, parts of the scene change, "changing the subject matter of the entire scene"):

Ann Montanaro reminds us that these types of innovations are due to the fact that Dean & Son

established a special department of skilled craftsmen who prepared the hand-made mechanicals...[which included] transformational plates based on the jalousie or Venetian blind principle.... The illustrations in these books had either a square or an oblong picture divided into four or five equal sections by corresponding horizontal or vertical slits. When a tab at the side or bottom of the illustration was pulled, the picture "transformed" into another picture.

An example of this type of transformational book can be seen in the right-hand column of this blog by clicking on Moving Animal under Bookish Podcasts and Webcasts (for the full effect, make sure your sound is on).  [For other video samples of movable books, click on Always Jolly or Cock Robin or Robert Sabuda under Bookish Podcasts & Webcasts.  For an in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at the actual mechanisms that animate such books, be sure to click on the video Preservation of Movable Books.]

Dean & Son's pre-eminence as publishers of moveable books for children would not be seriously challenged until the 1870s, as we shall see in tomorrow's post...

Movable Books and The Private Library (Part II)

As you may recall from our series of posts on children's literature (9-14 June 2009), "it wasn't until John Newbery published A Little Pretty Pocket-Book in 1744 that children's literature as we know it today came into being."  It was not until some years after the appearance of this landmark publication that the first successful movable books for children were published.

As Ann Montanaro has noted, these books--called variously metamorphoses books, turn-up books and/or Harlequinades (these latter designed by the London publisher and bookseller Robert Sayer ca. 1765)--were composed of single, printed sheets folded perpendicularly into four. Hinged at the top and bottom of each fold, the picture was cut through horizontally across the center to make two flaps that could be opened up or down. When raised, the pages disclosed another hidden picture underneath, each having a few lines of verse:

A similar type of "life-the-flap book" was developed by the miniature portrait painter William Grimaldi.  In The Toliet (1821), Grimaldi used items on his "daughter's dressing table as representations of specific virtues. The articles served as flaps, which, when lifted up, revealed scenes illustrating each virtue."  (The images below are from a later printing of this title, ca. 1845.)  He produced a similar book for boys, A Suit of Armour for Youth (1823), which substituted pieces of armour for tolietry items, to the same moral effect.  Both books were published by his son, Stacy:

Another type of movable book for children was introduced by the London publishers S & J Fuller beginning ca. 1810.  Known as paper doll books, each book included movable paper clothes.  A recent University of North Texas exhibition of such books notes that [t]he character  wore a specific outfit in each episode of the verse; thus, as the book was read, the doll was supposed to be dressed in the appropriate attire. The books would often tell morality tales aimed at children.  Such books were more expensive than regular children's books, and were most likely marketed to the upper classes:

Another early movable book for children was the peep show or tunnel book, which may have evolved from the traveling exhibits that often accompanied early fairs and festivals.  So called because they usually depicted "scenes from famous stories or topical events and were viewed through a small hole in the cover," they became especially popular in the mid-1800s, after the opening of the tunnel under the Thames River in London (accounting for the latter name).  A modern example of this type of book, by noted book artist Carol Barton, is depicted below:

It was a publishing firm founded in London sometime before 1800 that would launch the first mass production of movable books for children, as we shall see in tomorrow's post....

Movable Books and The Private Library (Part I)

Almost since the codex first came to prominence in the 4th century CE "artists, philosophers, scientists, and book designers have tried to challenge the book's bibliographic boundaries. They have added flaps, revolving parts, and other movable pieces to enhance the text:"

Ann Montanaro, founder of the Movable Book Society, whom we have quoted above (and whose bibliographies about movable books are the standard references for this subject), also notes that

It is not known who invented the first mechanical device in a book, but one of the earliest examples was produced in the 13th century by Catalan mystic and poet Ramon Llull of Majorca who used a revolving disc or volvelle...to illustrate his theories. Throughout the centuries volvelles have been used for such diverse purposes as teaching anatomy, making astronomical predictions, creating secret codes, and telling fortunes. Yet, while it can be documented that movable parts had been used for centuries, they were almost always used in scholarly works. It was not until the 18th century that these techniques were applied to books designed for entertainment, particularly for children....

Volvelles (think "early analog computers made of rotating paper parts") most often were found in books on astronomy (the volvelle depicted below is from Astronomicum Caesareum by Petrus Apianus, 1540):

Apianus' magnum opus, which explains the use of the astrolabe (for calculating the altitude of stars) and other instruments used to calculate planetary positions, was published with eighteen volvelles, with seed pearls attached to the string markers of each.  Only about 40 copies of this work are still believed to exist, and very few of these copies still have the original seed pearls attached.

Volvelles make it clear that the more inclusive term for these types of books is movable books, not pop-up books.  (All pop-up books are movable books, but not all movable books--those with volvelles, for example--are pop-up books.)

Even with the significant advances in paper engineering that would take place beginning in the 18th century, volvelles continue to find a wide range of uses, as Jessica Helfand makes clear in her 2002 book (which served as the catalog for a 2004 Grolier Club exhibition of the same name), Reinventing the Wheel:

  

As Ms. Helfand notes in her book,

The twentieth century saw a robust growth in the design, manufacture, and production of a new generation of independent, free-standing volvelles. Categorically, they not only represent an unusually eclectic set of uses, but demonstrate, too, a remarkable range of stylistic, compositional, mechanical, informational, and kinetic conceits. There are volvelles that arrange their data peripherally, centrifugally, and radially; volvelles that use multiple concentric circles with pointers; and volvelles that benefit from the generous use of the die-cut, a particular technological hallmark of modern printing manufacture. Twentieth-century volvelles — often referred to as "wheel charts" — offer everything from inventory control to color calibration, mileage metering to verb conjugation. They anticipate animal breeding cycles and calculate radiation exposure, measure chocolate consumption and quantify bridge tips, chart bird calls, convert metrics, and calculate taxes. There are fortune-telling wheels and semaphore-charting wheels; emergency first-aid wheels and electronic fix-it wheels; playful wheels that test phonetics and prophylactic wheels that prevent pregnancy:

The advent of movable books designed especially to entertain children would take even this type of paper engineering to a whole new level, as we shall see in tomorrow's post....

Falsified History and The Private Library

"The media" over here in the US of A has worked itself into a good old-fashioned lather over the discovery that Fox News, a major media outlet for some folks, has been "doctoring" the news, that mythical creature of yore which supposedly thrives on objectivity. The brouhaha has arisen over Fox News' insertion of a crowd scene from video news footage shot at an unrelated event into video news footage of a more recent event.  This enhancement of the news is, critics charge, nothing new at Fox News, and several websites purport to keep track of the more egregious instances of Fox's malfeasance in thus "reporting" the news.

Our objective in today's post is not to take sides in this debate, but merely to point out--as folks who collect books about the news industry are well aware--'tis nothing new:

  

As we suggested in our post on collecting books about propaganda (11 September 2009), most folks can be manipulated incredibly easily, especially those who persist in giving credence to that old saw, seeing is believing.  The days when that adage could be trusted passed decades ago, as several books have made us all too keenly aware:

    

Debating Fox News' falsification of the historical record can easily plunge one into a long and tortuous examination of what is meant by freedom of the press, and of its frequent traveling companion, censorship.

As we plan to do a future series of posts on these interrelated topics, we are content for now to point out that the demand for books about this topic (the falsification of photographs and, by extension, of history) does not come only from folks building a private library about the news industry (in this context, focusing upon yellow journalism), but also from folks building private libraries about photography (in this context, what some concerned critics now term the post-photographic age; cf. our posts of 1-9 November 2009), history (in this context, falsified history; cf. our posts of 12-14 July 2009) and related subjects.

Optimists are prone to assert that in the Age of the Internet falsification of history is much more difficult than in ages past, since there are "eyes everywhere" ready to correct the historical record (à la Iran's recent election as reported by "the folks in the streets" via Twitter).  Of course, this happy view may be undermined should all that digital data all go bye-bye....

Local Treasures and The Private Library

This is our 238th consecutive daily post.  It's sobering to think that, if we keep at this for...let's say, five years, we will have published 1,825 consecutive pieces of original content.  What the heck were we thinking when we started this?!

Actually, we have always been pretty clear about our "mission," such as it is, as we have made obvious in several previous posts (see, for example, our post of 20 June 2009):  the book is not dead (see our post of 7 October 2009), despite the very real challenges that currently are transforming publishing and bookselling (see our post of 15 October 2009); and it still is possible to build a private library of significance to yourself, the marketplace and future scholars for very little money using strategies like contrarian collecting and venues like yard sales, garage sales, friends-of-the-library book sales, publishers' clearance sales and the like (see all 237 previous posts!).

As we have seen with genres like romance fiction (see our posts of 26-28 April 2009), science fiction (4-7 July 2009), hardboiled detective fiction (30 June-3 July 2009) and westerns (25-29 June 2009), inexpensive bookish treasures abound if you know where to look for them.  And the best place to start (as should be obvious from our frequent references to yard sales, garage sales and friends-of-the-library book sales) is often locally.

What sparks this little bit of "soapbox" about local treasures is the approach of two major holidays here in the USA, both of which center, among other things, on feasting.  Both holidays have their origins in pre-Christian harvest festivals, and thus both holidays often give folks an excuse to buy a good cookbook or two. 

Funny thing about cookbooks...you can pick many of 'em up for next-to-nothing at local yard sales, garage sales and friends-of-the-library book sales.  Not only that, but many of these cookbooks have a regional or local focus, which makes them of interest not only to folks who collect cookbooks, but also to folks who collect local histories, folks who collect books about the built environment, folks who collect biographies, and suchlike...

    

Many of these cookbooks were published to raise funds for various worthy local projects...

   

But the best of these often give fascinating insights into the communities for which they were published...

   

Yet another reason to buy local....

Making The Private Library Mobile

We are strongly committed to making The Private Library as accessible as possible to as many people as possible.

Accordingly, you will find links for subscribing to The Private Library via email (see the link at the top of the right-hand column); via RSS (click on the orange RSS icon in the URL field); via the Web (a simple search will bring this blog up on the first page of most searches on Google, Yahoo, etc.).  All of these give you free access to everything on offer at The Private Library, including our hundreds of links to other quality bookish blogs, bibliographic resources, bookish organizations and the like.

And now, for those of you who have been...lobbying...us about this, you can subscribe to our daily posts via your Kindle by clicking here:

We still do not fully comprehend why someone would want to pay for something that otherwise is available free of charge (especially since all you get access to is our daily posts in black & white only), but we aim to please, so pony up $1.99 a month and it's yours....

Mimpish Squinnies and The Private Library

Given what passes for books from many publishers these days (poorly edited, poorly printed, poorly bound), it's always a pleasure to report on books that are still made the old-fashioned way: from hand-set type, designed and printed (with multi-block illustrations in precise register) on really fine paper, finely bound in the finest appropriate materials.  Nobody makes books this way anymore, except for a few die-hard fine press printers, illustrators, bookbinders.  Praise (your preferred deity) for every single one of 'em!

As noted in our series of posts on fine press books (3-6 May 2009), one of the best places to fully experience the beauty and glory of fine press printing is one of the three major biennial fairs devoted to the subject, one of which just recently concluded.  The Oxford Fine Press Book Fair regularly attracts some five dozen fine presses from around the world, and the books each press exhibits at this fair are some of the finest examples of the book as art that you are ever likely to encounter.  Even for folks who do fine press printing for a living, this embarrassment of riches often makes it difficult to hand out accolades for the best of the best, which this fair does via two major awards, the Judges' Choice Awards (for Best Book in Show) and The Gregynog Prize (for the finest letterpress book printed in the past two years).

Images of such award winners cannot even begin to convey the tactile experience of holding one of these books in your hands.  But they will, hopefully, give you some sense (however paltry) of what has been lost in modern-day publishing. 

This year's Judges' Choice Awards went to Circle Press for its printing of Full Circle Editions' (a new publishing house founded, in part, by Harry Potter's "discoverer-in-chief") The Burning of the Books (a poem sequence by George Szirtes based on 1981 Nobel Laureate' Elias Canetti's "book destruction nightmare" Auto da Fé, illustrated in gravure by Ron King)...

 

...to Russell Maret for his tour de force of color letterpress printing, Aethelwold...

 

...to Parvenu Press for its haunting engagement with the traditional fairy tale, And Other Fairy Tales...

 

...to Shirley Sharoff for her artist's book, The Waves (text by Virginia Woolf)...

 

...and to Whittington Press (publisher of Matrix, arguably the world's finest continuing periodical about fine press printing) for Portmeirion (home to The Prisoner television series of cult fame), a fine example of what can be achieved with modern technology (in this case, a digital drawing tablet, which duplicates somewhat the earlier hand-colored illustration process known as pochoir)...

 

The winner of The Gregynog Prize for the best letterpress printed book of the past two years...?  Lone Oak Press, for its stunning take on the British horticulturist' Reginald Farrer's work about plants that he particularly disliked, Mimpish Squinnies: Reginald Farrer’s Short Guide to Worthless Plants.  Wittily illustrated by Abigail Rorer, beautifully designed and printed by Kat Ran Press on Kozo paper from type set by Michael and Winifred Bixler, with a Mark Tomlinson binding of handmade plant fiber paper-over-boards and a green leather spine, this title is indeed a worthy recipient of such a prestigious award:

  

Our congratulations to one and all!  May you live long and prosper....

Chromolithography and The Private Library (Part III)

Had chromolithography remained the expensive, labor intensive process it was in its earliest years, it is unlikely that it would have had much impact on book illustration.  But as publishers found ways to make chromolithography less expensive (thanks to the advent of steam-powered printing presses and less expensive paper stocks), consumer demand for chromolithographs exploded, reaching its peak in the last decades of the 19th century.  And while one is unlikely to encounter books like The Grammar of Ornament at yard sales, garage sales, friends-of-the-library book sales and the like, many of the books published during those latter decades are encountered at such sales, as are numerous other chromolithographed items, such as greeting cards, advertising, sheet music covers, cigar box labels, fruit crate labels, and so on.

Among the many publishers creating, and responding to, this demand was the great German chromolithographer Lothar Meggendorfer:

 

Known especially for his company's movable books (the subject of a future series of posts), Meggendorfer published some 200 of these now much-coveted titles, the most stunning of which probably is Internationaler Zirkus (ca. 1888):

 

Another publisher fueling the chromolithography "craze" was August Hoen, a German immigrant whose Baltimore (Maryland) firm is best known today for its stunning chromolithographed sheet music covers for the E. T. Paull Company:

 

But perhaps the most prolific and influential of all chromolithographic publishers was the Boston firm of L. Prang & Co.:

Born in Breslau in Prussian Silesia (known today as Wroclaw, Poland), Louis Prang worked in the printing and textile industries in Europe before emigrating to the United States in 1850.  In 1856 he and a partner started a company to produce lithographs, concentrating initially on towns and buildings in Massachusetts as subject matter.  In 1860, Prang bought out his partner and began color printing of advertising and other business materials.  His firm became especially well-known during the American Civil War for its war maps, which were widely distributed in newspapers.

In 1864 Prang went to Germany to study cutting-edge lithography techniques, and it was after his return to America that his firm started to produce the chromolithographs for which they are best known.  These chromolithographs were initially mostly reproductions of fine art, but shortly thereafter (1875) the firm began producing America's first Christmas cards (somewhat ironic, since Boston's early settlers had once banned celebrations of Christmas):

    

 As Lori Rotskoff has pointed out, Prang was not above using celebrity endorsements to insure the widest possible distribution of his chromolithographic prints.  His short-lived periodical Prang's Chromo: A Journal of Popular Art (published in five issues from January 1868 to April 1869)

printed a letter in which [Harriet Beecher] Stowe [author of Uncle Tom's Cabin] thanked Louis Prang for sending her several free chromolithographs. After praising the “beautiful objects,” Stowe concluded her note with the kind of testimonial Prang no doubt had been seeking when he sent her the complimentary items: “Be assured I shall neglect no opportunity of proving my sympathy with your so charming and beautiful mission, and bringing it to everyone's notice, so far as I can.”

His chromolithographed books were nearly as popular as his prints:

One title in particular stands out: The Yellowstone National Park, and the Mountain Regions of Portions of Idaho, Nevada, Colorado, and Utah(1876).

To take advantage of public excitement over the creation of Yellowstone National Park, Prang had commissioned the great landscape painter Thomas Moran to paint a series of pictures, which Prang reproduced as a portfolio of chromolithographs four years after the park was officially established, an enterprise nicely captured by Joni Kinsey's 2006 publication Thomas Moran's West: Chromolithography, High Art, And Popular Taste:

Although 1000 copies of the Moran portfolio were printed, all but about 150 copies (the number of copies initially sold) were destroyed in a fire in 1877.  The portfolio's stunning chromolithography led the Times of London to proclaim that "no finer specimens of chromo-lithographic work have been produced anywhere:"

 

    

Very few complete copies of this work still exist (one copy is held by Brigham Young University).  Fortunately, Prang--and many other publishers--would go on to produce so many books illustrated by chromolithography (not to mention all those prints) that the last decades of the 19th century in America would be derided by a contemporary of Prang's as chromo civilization.

Probably the best historical overview of chromolithography in America remains Peter Marzio's The Democratic Art: Pictures for a Nineteenth-Century America, Chromolithography 1840-1900:

 

Although published over a quarter-century ago (in association with an exhibition of chromolithography at the Amon Carter Museum in Ft. Worth, Texas), one will find that the above title is readily available in today's marketplace.... 

Chromolithography and The Private Library (Part II)

The Grammar of Ornament (1856), arguably the most famous and influential chromolithographed book ever published, was the magnum opus of the English architect and designer Owen Jones:

   
A pivotal figure in the founding of the South Kensington Museum (later reorganized into the world's greatest museum of art and design, the Victoria & Albert Museum), Jones is widely considered the greatest chromolithographic designer of the 19th century.  He rose to prominence on the basis of his studies of Islamic decorations at the Alhambra Palace, which studies he published in Plans, Elevations, Sections, and Details of the Alhambra: from drawings taken on the spot by the late M. Jules Goury and in 1834 and 1837 by Owen Jones....:

Published in twelve parts over a span of almost ten years (1836-1845), and later as a two-volume book (1842-1845), this work was the first title ever published to significantly utilize chromolithography, and it set the stage for Jones' Grammar of Ornament, which would arise from his involvement with the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations (London, 1851--the world's first world's fair).

Jones was one of the Superintendents of Works for the Great Exhibition, responsible not only for the interior decoration of the Crystal Palace within which it was housed, but also for the arrangement of its exhibits.  His decorative scheme initially proved quite controversial, though such criticism eventually dissipated:

His work on the Great Exhibition brought Jones into contact with Henry Cole, who later would become the first Director of the South Kensington Museum. (Cole previously had modernized the British postal system, published a number of children's books under the pseudonym Felix Summerly, and had commissioned the world's first commercially produced Christmas card in 1843.)  Cole arranged for Jones to present his design theories via a series of lectures, but both men became concerned that the London location might make it difficult for Jones' theories to receive the widest possible dissemination to students.  Thus was born The Grammar of Ornament....

Over the course of several decades, Jones produced other chromolithographed titles, primarily for the publishers Day & Son and Longman & Co.:

  

But the greatest of all chromolithographic publishers wasn't to be found in Great Britain... he published instead from Boston (Massachusetts), where he not only would print one of the greatest of all chromolithographed books, but also would "father the American Christmas card"....

Chromolithography and The Private Library (Part I)

Anyone who collects books from the nineteenth century, or the earliest decades of the 20th century, is likely to have encountered titles illustrated by chromolithographs.

The process of lithography was invented by Alois Senefelder in 1798, which discovery was first documented in his 1818 book Vollständiges Lehrbuch der Steindruckerey (A Complete Course of Lithography).  The first English edition of this landmark work was published a year later, and it has since been reprinted many times.  (The original 1818 First Edition is almost never available in the marketplace, and when it is available it commands a substantial premium, as does the first English edition.  This also is true of the other books discussed in today's post.  Many of these have been broken up over the years, so their chromolithographs could be sold as separate plates.):

 

Senefelder's process, as the University of Delaware notes in a recent exhibition of the process,

was the first fundamentally new printing technology since the invention of relief printing in the fifteenth century. It is a mechanical planographic process in which the printing and non-printing areas of the plate are all at the same level, as opposed to intaglio and relief processes in which the design is cut into the printing block. Lithography is based on the chemical repellence of oil and water. Designs are drawn or painted with greasy ink or crayons on specially prepared limestone. The stone is moistened with water, which the stone accepts in areas not covered by the crayon. An oily ink, applied with a roller, adheres only to the drawing and is repelled by the wet parts of the stone. The print is then made by pressing paper against the inked drawing.

This process was refined over the next several decades, as methods were sought to replace hand-coloring of illustrations.  Lithography suggested a solution:

Multiple stones were used, one for each color, and the print went through the press as many times as there were stones. The problem for the printers was keeping the image in register, making sure that the print would be lined up exactly each time it went through the press so that each color would be in the correct position and the overlaying colors would merge correctly....  Overprinting and the use of silver and gold inks widened the range of color and design.

It is difficult to convey to someone who has never actually examined one in person just how extraordinarily beautiful a well-printed chromolithograph can be, especially when heightened with gold or bronze:

 

The best examples of chromolithography, which required several months of labor utilizing multiple stones printed in exact register, were so good that they were successfully marketed to the public as replacements for original oil paintings.

America's first chromolithographic printer, William Sharp, produced his first chromolithograph in 1840, although his first high-quality chromolithographic book was not published until a few years later.  This book, The Fruits Of America, Containing Richly Colored Figures, And full descriptions On All The Choicest Varieties Cultivated In The United States (by Charles Mason Covey) was first published in parts (1847-1856) before being published in book form (two volumes with ninety-six plates):

 

What is arguably his best chromolithographed book, though, would come a few years later, with his publication of John Fisk Allen's Victoria Regia; Or, the Great Water Lily of America (1854), which has the distinction of being the earliest example of large scale color printing in the United States:

 

At about the same time, in a country not all that far away, an Englishman was preparing to print what is arguably the most influential chromolithographed book ever published....

Guest Editorial: The Right to Read Freely and The Private Library

From the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression:

The Campaign for Reader Privacy [urges readers] to contact members of the [U.S.] House of Representatives in support of a bill that would effectively ban the government from using the Patriot Act to engage in fishing expeditions to identify the books that people borrow or purchase.

The House Judiciary Committee last week approved the USA Patriot Amendments Act of 2009 (H.R. 3845), which prohibits the use of Section 215 of the Patriot Act to search the records of a library patron or bookstore customer unless there are “specific and articulable facts” to show that the person is “a suspected agent of a foreign power” or someone who is in contact or known to the suspected agent.

Currently, Section 215 allows the FBI to secretly obtain any “tangible thing,” including any business records that are “relevant” to an ongoing investigation, including the records of people who are not suspected of any criminal acts. However, Congress is currently debating changes in Section 215 and other provisions of the Patriot Act that expire in December. H.R. 3845 would allow readers to borrow and purchase books without fear that the government is monitoring their reading selections, while at the same time permitting Section 215 searches of bookstore and library records of suspected foreign agents and terrorists.

“The passage of H.R. 3845 would be a major victory in our eight-year fight to restore the protections for the privacy of reader records,” said Larry Siems, Director of Freedom to Write and International Programs at PEN American Center. Siems noted that the vote in the House will occur soon. “Now is the time for everyone who cares about protecting the right to read freely, without fear that government is reading over our shoulders, to call or write their House representatives.”

The Campaign for Reader Privacy is also urging calls and faxes to members of the {U.S.] Senate, who may vote on a re-authorization bill (S. 1692) as soon as next week.

It is calling for the addition to S. 1692 of protections for the privacy of bookstore records. S. 1692 only provides protections for library records. The Campaign for Reader Privacy was organized in 2004 by the American Booksellers Association, the American Library Association, the Association of American Publishers, and PEN American Center. Its goal is to ensure that Americans can purchase and borrow books without fear that the government is reading over their shoulders.

For more information please click here....

Smelly Old Books and The Private Library

Anyone who collects older books, or who has browsed a bookstore with lots of older titles (or a library stocked with older books), well recalls the characteristic mustiness of the bookshelves. 

For many, this is a very comforting smell, since it speaks to the survival of books despite everything that's stacked against them (no pun intended): things like fires, floods, wars, and simple neglect (benign or otherwise).  However, some book collectors, as well as most professional librarians, view this smell somewhat differently, since it speaks to the fact that such books are deteriorating on a daily basis:

As books age, the paper on which they are printed begins to emit a mixture of volatile and semi-volatile organic compounds (VOC).  This odor is especially noticeable in books printed from roughly 1850-1990.  Books printed during this period were printed on paper made from wood pulp (rather than the rag fibers used in previous centuries), and such paper usually was saturated with rosin to make it better capable of receiving an inked impression (a topic we touched on briefly in our post of 17 July 2009).  Lignin, a major component of wood pulp, yellows with age.  And rosin eventually breaks down into corrosive, acidic byproducts (paper previously had been sized with gelatin, which is a more neutral product).

Traditionally, diagnosing the rapidity with which books are degrading required that paper actually be removed from a book and tested.  Now, however, word comes from the peer-reviewed journal Analytic Chemistry (a publication of the American Chemical Society) of a non-destructive test that will achieve the same end, material degradomics.  Material degradomics links "a book’s physical state to its corresponding VOC emissions pattern." 

The more quickly at-risk books can be identified, the more quickly steps can be undertaken to halt and (perhaps) reverse such deterioration....

The Great War and The Private Library

It was supposed to be the war to end all wars. 

It was not, of course.  When it ended--on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918--15 million were dead, and the seeds of World War II had been planted.

A lot of books were published to try and sort things out; to excoriate the poor leadership in evidence before, during and after the conflict; to memorialize the fallen:

    

Poets tried to capture the futility of it all...

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. (Rupert Brooke)

But it would take 76 years, and an astronomer, to really capture the waste of this, and all wars, most succinctly. 

In 1990, a spacecraft--Voyager I--turned and took a final photo of its home planet before it sailed away forever into the unknown reaches of outer space.   Taken from a distance of almost 4 billion miles, Earth is but a speck:

 

Carl Sagan, the Cornell University astronomer who had chaired the committee that designed the Golden Record which accompanied both Voyager spacecraft (launched in 1977), had this to say about the above photograph in a lecture at Cornell on 13 October 1994:

That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

For veterans of all nationalities, wherever you may be....

Photography and The Private Library (Part IX)

Book collectors seeking to build a private library about photography have to make some difficult choices.  Even with unlimited financial resources, unlimited bookshelf space and all the time in the world, they cannot possibly collect everything that's been published about photography--many such books are simply never available in the marketplace.

Even when a collector limits his or her focus to a popular subset of works about photography, such as the work of specific individual photographers, the difficult choices do not go away.  Many individual photographers have published works that have become extremely influential, and such works (especially in anything approaching Fine condition) command substantial premiums whenever they appear in the marketplace:

   

Collectors therefore usually do not attempt to collect all the influential books that have been published by specific individual photographers, but focus instead on only one or two photographers whose influence has been widely acknowledged.  This might mean the iconic works of specific women photographers...

    

or the influential works of specific nature photographers...

    

or influential works of documentary photography...

  

or iconic works about the human figure...

  

or perhaps a retrospective of the works of several influential photographers bound into a single book...

 

Tough decisions....

You probably are going to need more bookshelves....

Photography and The Private Library (Part VIII)

Towards the end of the 19th century photography underwent another major development as it gave birth to cinematography (the subject of a future series of posts).

Photography itself was advancing at a rapid pace, the works of the earliest photographers now beginning to reach the mass market via a wondrous array of books, many of which would become extremely influential:

     

These latter decades of the 19th century saw terrible wars, the beginnings of world's fairs and important explorations of far-flung peoples and places, many of these duly recorded by a photographer:

 

The photographers responsible for such works were able to draw upon an array of manuals and handbooks specific to particular photographic processes, as well as books on composition, lighting and related aesthetic matters:

   

Book collectors building a private library about photography can pick up many of these late 19th century works for as little as a few hundred dollars per title, although the more influential the work is, and the better the condition of the book (many are not known to exist at all in Fine condition), the more money one will have to expend to add a particular title to one's bookshelves.

Specific photographers are arguably the most popular focus of many private libraries about photography, and several now famous photographers were active in the latter decades of the 19th century.  Often their contemporary publication in book form is known only from one or two titles (such as the photographs of Julia Margaret Cameron), while the work of other photographic luminaries was not published in book form (especially all known photographs) until many decades after their death (such as the photographs of Lewis Caroll):

    

What many collectors new to this field overlook is that the first publication of a now famous photographer's work may well have been in a periodical, not in a book.  Some of these periodicals have become famous in their own right over the past century or so, due to the high caliber of photography they were able to attract:

    

One of the best ways to view many of these earliest titles about photography is to pay an online visit to the private library Photobibliothek.ch (located in the vicinity of Schaffhausen in Switzerland). 

The most comprehensive printed bibliography of titles about photography remains Roosens’ & Salu's 4-volume History of Photography: A Bibliography of Books (London: Continuum Intl. Pub. Group/Mansell, 1989-1999), although it obviously is now some years out-of-date.  This title contains extensive coverage of works about individual photographers, with Vol. 1 covering photographers born before 1914, Vol. 2 covering photographers born up to 1936, Vol. 3 covering photographers born up to 1950 and Vol. 4 covering photographers born after 1950.  (An updated version on CD-ROM [Windows only] was published in 2003 by the Antwerp FotoMuseum).  A slightly more comprehensive online bibliographic database is available at PhotoLit (updated through October 2006), although it only covers works published since 1839.

In tomorrow's post, the last in this series, we will look at more recent examples of titles by specific photographers, many of which now command substantial premiums in the marketplace....

Photography and The Private Library (Part VII)

Advances throughout the remaining decades of the 19th century would rapidly advance photography's fortunes, bringing it ever closer to ubiquitousness.  Among the highlights were Janez Puhar's invention of a means for making photographs on glass; Frederick Scott Archer's invention of the collodion process (put to good use by Lewis Carroll, among others); Herbert Bowyer Berkeley's refinements to the chemistry needed to develop photographs; and George Eastman's refinement of Talbot's original process which ultimately would lead to the first mass market camera, the Kodak Brownie.

These developments were duly recorded, but books from the earliest decades (1830s-1850s), as noted in previous posts, are rarely seen in the marketplace and, when available, often command enormous sums of money:

   

This is basically a problem of supply and demand.  Most book collectors understand the supply side of the equation, but not necessarily the demand side.  On the supply side, you have low print runs for virtually all of the books, and even smaller print runs for the various periodicals in which such discoveries were announced.  (The problem with periodicals is compounded by the fact that some libraries have in the past had a habit of microfilming early periodicals, then pulping the originals, thereby eliminating a major avenue--deaccessioning-- whereby early periodicals and books often enter the marketplace.)  And both books and periodicals have had to survive the vicissitudes of nearly a century and a half, including floods, fires, wars, poor storage conditions and related ills.

On the demand side, the folks adding these early books and periodicals to their private libraries are not just photography buffs--in fact, given the sums of money these materials frequently fetch, it's unlikely casual book collectors are involved in the demand side at all.  What you do have is a demand from a lot of other interested parties that may not be immediately obvious to most collectors.  For example:

• Folks who are collecting local histories (an early photography book may contain the earliest, or only, known 19th century photograph of a particular locale or feature; because exposure times for the earliest photographs were usually quite lengthy, landscapes, buildings and other immovable objects were preferred subjects for a lot of the earliest photographers--for this reason, such books also are popular with folks seeking to document the evolution of natural environments and with folks collecting books about architecture)
• Folks collecting books about science, especially chemistry (all photographic processes being chemical prior to the advent of digital photography)
• Folks collecting biographies (biographical information included in many early books of photography may represent the earliest known sources of such information for pioneers in the field)
• Folks collecting printing history (especially information about early publishers and printers, some of which were founded for the specific purpose of publishing early books on photography)
• Folks collecting examples of the book arts (early photography books being representative of early illustrative techniques)
• And collectors in other fields of interest as well....

Collectors who do not have access to unlimited funds will usually, therefore, elect to cover these earliest decades of photography by adding to their bookshelves one or more of the excellent modern histories that are available in the marketplace.  These may be general...

     

or they may be specific to a particular photographic process from those early decades...

    

or they may focus less on the processes of those early decades and more on actual surviving photographs from that era...

   

Or, as a refinement of the above, they may focus on the work of a specific photographer(s) of those earliest decades...

   

In the modern era, collecting works of specific photographers is arguably the most popular method, by far, of creating a private library about photography, as we shall see in tomorrow's post....

Photography and The Private Library (Part VI)

Daguerre's process, as noted in previous posts, took the world by storm, and the discovery was published in a host of languages, most notably in books that were printed the very year that the process was gifted to the world by the French government (1839):

     

However...a  week before France announced its gift to the world (12 August 1839) Daguerre himself had registered a patent for his process in Great Britain.  As things turned out, Great Britain would be the only nation where Daguerre's patent was ever enforced.  

As early as 1834, an English polymath, William Fox Talbot, had engaged in photographic experiments of his own, building upon discoveries made by the astronomer John Herschel (who posited that hyposulphite of soda could be used to permanently fix photographic images) and the noted pottery manufacturer Thomas Wedgwood (who developed a means of copying visible images chemically to permanent media).  Reading of Daguerre's process, Talbot scrambled to stake his own claim to priority of discovery, revealing the details of his process to members of Great Britain's Royal Society several months before Daguerre fully divulged the details of his own process. 

Because Talbot patented his calotype process two years later (1841), he greatly limited adoption of the process.  This, despite the fact that his book depicting the results of this process, The Pencil of Nature, would become one of the most influential books of photography ever published.

The first photographically-illustrated book to be commercially published, The Pencil of Nature was originally issued in parts, though thereafter reprinted numerous times in book form:

Only about fifteen complete sets of the original publication-in-parts are believed to exist, with perhaps another two dozen substantially complete sets also known.  Containing 24 original salted paper prints from paper negatives, the parts were issued over a two-year period (June 1844-April 1846).  Published to promote his patented process, The Pencil of Nature was not initially a commercial success, and Talbot abandoned its publication before a seventh set of plates was prepared.  Talbot's supporting prose text, however, often was as attractive as his photographs, and history would judge this landmark publication much more favorably....

 

This is one of the trifling efforts of [photography’s] infancy, which some partial friends have been kind enough to commend. We have sufficient authority in the Dutch school of art, for taking as subjects of representation scenes of daily and familiar occurrence. A painter’s eye will often be arrested where ordinary people see nothing remarkable. A casual gleam of sunshine, or a shadow thrown across his path, a time withered oak, or a moss covered stone may awaken a train of thoughts and feelings, and picturesque imaginings....

Photography and The Private Library (Part V)

Florence's discovery notwithstanding, it was Daguerre's process that would produce the world's first practical means of taking photographs. 

Summaries of Daguerre's process were published shortly after his presentation to the French Académie des sciences in January of 1839 (in a surprisingly wide range of periodicals, all of which are now very rare and seldom seen in the marketplace).  It was only after the French government bought Daguerre's patent (in exchange for a lifetime pension) and made his process a gift "Free to the World" on 19 August 1839 that the publishing floodgates opened:

 

Books like History and practice of photogenic drawing on the true principles of the daguerréotype: with the new method of dioramic painting: secrets purchased by the French government, and by their command published for the benefit of the arts and manufactures / by the inventor L.J.M. Daguerre managed to reach a third English-language edition before the end of 1839.

The partnership originally created between Daguerre and Niépce had stipulated that [i]n the eventuality of one of the partners demise, this one will be replaced in the company for the rest of the ten years that would not be expired, by his natural heir.  Thus, after Niépce's death in 1833 his position in the partnership was assumed by his son, Isidore.  Isidore made no real contributions to this partnership, and Daguerre took advantage of this by heavily promoting his own process to the detriment of Nicephore Niépce's original discoveries in heliography. Although the French government awarded a lifetime pension of 4000 francs to both Isidore and Daguerre, it was Daguerre's process that received near instant, worldwide fame.

Seeking to avenge the slight to his father, Isidore published in 1841 a pamphlet titled History of the discovery improperly misnamed daguerreotype, preceded by a note from its real inventor Joseph-Nicephore Niépce.

Thus began the long process to rehabilitate the name of Niépce in the annals of photography.  But both Niépce and Daguerre would be overshadowed by an Englishman, whose book (published just three years after the publication of Isidore's pamphlet) would become one of the most influential books ever published in photography....

Photography and The Private Library (Part IV)

The camera obscura was used as an aid to artists for several centuries before Niépce started researching some way to permanently fix the images created by means of this device.  He achieved results as early as May 1816, though the images (which he called retinas) eventually completely blackened and disappeared.

Continued experiments with solutions that light would bleach rather than darken led to Niépce's 1822 discovery of what we know today as the contact print, and from 1824 on he was able to actually fix images by using lithographic stones coated with Judea bitumen.  This process, now known as heliography, would not actually be published until 1839 (when it would be overshadowed by another's improvements).  This would come about through the fortuitous circumstance of Niépce encountering one Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre while traveling to England in December 1827.

Daguerre and Niépce struck up a convivial and productive relationship, and the two men created a partnership in 1829 to try and develop heliography further.  This partnership led in 1832 to the discovery of the physautotype, which used the residue of lavender oil distillation to reduce exposure times from days to as little as eight hours (in the sun).

When Niépce died in 1833 he left his notes to Daguerre, who--despite having no scientific background-- made two additional discoveries that would be important to the history of photography.  He discovered that by exposing silver to iodine vapor before exposing it to light, and then exposing this to mercury fumes after a photograph was taken, one could capture a latent image.  By bathing a plate so exposed in a salt bath, this latent image could then be fixed.

But Daguerre was not the first to discover this process.  In 1832 the French-Brazilian painter and inventor Antoine Hercule Romuald Florence, with the help of a pharmacist friend, Joaquim Correa de Mello, invented a process he called photographie which used silver nitrate on paper to fix images in a process similar to that discovered by Daguerre.  Because of inadequate publicity, no doubt abetted by his being an otherwise obscure inventor in what was then a remote part of the world, Florence is rarely accorded the honors that other important figures in the development of photography receive:

    

On January 7, 1839, Daguerre presented his discoveries to the members of France's Académie des Sciences.  The world would never be the same....

Photography and The Private Library (Part III)

What is believed to be the first published drawing of a pinhole camera was printed in 1545 in a work by the Dutch mathematician, astronomer and mapmaker Gemma Frisius, De Radio Astronomica et Geometrica:

 

Frisius had used this camera obscura (a term coined by Johannes Kepler) to study the solar eclipse of 1544.  An actual photograph taken by a pinhole camera, however, would not be seen until several decades after photographs had been produced by other means (the 1850s, to be precise).

In 1727 a German professor of anatomy, Johann Heinrich Schulze, accidentally discovered that it was light, not heat (as had been presumed from observations in previous centuries) that caused silver salts to darken when exposed to sunlight, though he made no attempt at permanently preserving the images thus created:

I covered the glass with dark material, exposing a little part for the free entry of light. Thus I often wrote names and whole sentences on paper and carefully cut away the inked parts with a sharp knife. I struck the paper thus perforated on the glass with wax. It was not long before the sun's rays, where they hit the glass through the cut-out parts of the paper, wrote each word or sentence on the chalk precipitate so exactly and distinctly that many who were curious about the experiment but ignorant of its nature took occasion to attribute the thing to some sort of trick....

In 1760 a novel, Giphantie, was published by Tiphaigne de la Roche, Charles-François (whose fictional works anticipated inventions such as television and synthetic food):

The book likely would have languished in obscurity were it not for the fact that it fictionally depicts, almost seven decades before the process actually was discovered, modern-day chemical photography:

You know that rays of light reflected from different bodies form pictures, paint the image reflected on all polished surfaces, for example, on the retina of the eye, on water, and on glass. The spirits have sought to fix these fleeting images; they have made a subtle matter by means of which a picture is formed in the twinkling of an eye. They coat a piece of canvas with this matter, and place it in front of the object to be taken. The first effect of this cloth is similar to that of a mirror, but by means of its viscous nature the prepared canvas, as is not the case with the mirror, retains a facsimile of the image. The mirror represents images faithfully, but retains none; our canvas reflects them no less faithfully, but retains them all. This impression of the image is instantaneous. The canvas is then removed and deposited in a dark place. An hour later the impression is dry, and you have a picture the more precious in that no art can imitate its truthfulness....

The books depicted here, like those depicted in yesterday's post, are rarely found in the marketplace, especially in anything approaching Fine condition, and when available command often enormous sums.  This applies also to the books about photography published in the first few decades following Niépce's discovery, as we shall see shortly....

Photography and The Private Library (Part II)

Anyone building a private library about the history of photography is going to have a lot of ground to cover. As we noted in yesterday's post, the principles that underlie photography were known as early as the 5th-4th centuries BCE.  The works of the Chinese philosopher Mozi, for example, mention the effect of inverted images naturally forming through pinholes, an effect also mentioned in the writings of the Greek philosopher Aristotle and the Greek mathematician Euclid, and the principle underlying the pinhole camera. 

This basic idea was expanded upon in the 10th century CE by the famed Arab polymath Ḥasan ibn al-Ḥasan ibn al-Haytham (usually Latinized as Alhacen), known to medieval Europe as the Physicist and to the modern world as the Father of Optics (as well as the Father of the Modern Scientific Method, the Father of Experimental Physics and the Father of Experimental Psychology).  His seven volume Kitab al-Manazir (Book of Optics) is considered one of the most influential works on physics ever written, and in a related work he gives the first clear description and correct analysis of the functioning of a camera obscura. Published over the course of nearly a decade (1011-1021 CE), the Book of Optics was translated into Latin sometime in the late 12th-early 13th centuries and first achieved print in 1572 as Opticae thesaurus: Alhazeni Arabis libri septem, nuncprimum editi; Eiusdem liber De Crepusculis et nubium ascensionibus:

      

A few decades after al_Haytham, the Chinese polymath Shen Kuo established quantitative and geometrical attributes for the camera obscura, while also attributing the invention of movable type (porcelain) to Bi Sheng:

 

Among other early contributions to the history of photography were descriptions of the effect of sunlight and moonlight on silver nitrate (e.g., Albertus Magnus) and silver chloride (e.g., Pliny the Elder); Daniel Barbaro's 1568 description of a lens being used with a camera obscura; and Wilhelm Homberg's 1694 description of the photochemical effect:

But the greatest contributions were yet to come....

Photography and The Private Library (Part I)

Photography so permeates the modern world that one sometimes has difficulty remembering that there once was a time when it was dismissed as decidedly inferior to other plastic arts:

...a new industry has arisen which contributes not a little to confirming stupidity in its faith and to ruining what might have remained of the divine in the French genius. The idolatrous crowd postulates an ideal worthy of itself and appropriate to its nature -- that is perfectly understandable. As far as painting and sculpture are concerned, the current credo of the sophisticated public, above all in France...is this: ‘I believe in Nature, and I believe that Art is, and cannot be other than, the exact reproduction of Nature....Thus an industry that could give us a result identical to Nature would be the absolute of art.’ A vengeful God has granted the wishes of this multitude. Daguerre was his Messiah. And now the public says to itself: ‘Since photography gives us every guarantee of exactitude that we could desire (they really believe that, the idiots!), then photography and Art are the same thing.’ From that moment our squalid society rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze at its trivial image on a scrap of metal....Some democratic writer ought to have seen here a cheap method of disseminating a loathing for history and for painting among the people.... - Charles Baudelaire

The principles that underlie photography were known as early as the 5th-4th centuries BCE, so folks collecting books about photography do not lack for titles dedicated to this subject.  One can build a private library of books about photographic theory, about photographic history, about photographic technology.  They can collect books that focus on a single aspect of any of these, books that look at the evolution of each of these, books that celebrate a particular photographic practitioner or a particular photographic subject...even exhibition and auction catalogs of each of these.

Over the next several posts, we will examine each of these, beginning with the history of photography and the earliest known surviving photograph of the real world recorded by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826: