181
Carter in London, was probably the most infl uential
of these books, running to four editions by the 1890s.
The original edition, however, contained three original
photographs, one albumen and two carbon prints.
In addition to broadly-based manuals on photogra-
phy, a number of books and booklets each devoted to a
single process appeared during the decade. Small print
runs, and a widening audience for books on photography
made such publications both popular and economically
viable. C. Russell’s 80 page 1861 book The Tannin
Process proved suffi ciently popular to require a second
edition by 1863, and Sutton’s 1863 book The Collodion
Process, wet and dry required a second edition within a
year. Thomas Piper in London published Joseph Sidebo-
tham’s 1866 volume on The Collodio-Albumen Process
while Sampson Low published Sutton’s A Description of
Certain Instantaneous Dry Collodion Processes in 1864.
Intriguingly, with dry processes apparently sweeping all
before them as the decade drew to a close, Sutton also
published two books in 1869 which included a new wet
collodion process.
John Hannavy
See Also: Sidebotham, Joseph; Robinson, Henry
Peach; Blanquart-Evrard, Louis-Désiré; Snelling,
Henry Hunt; Sutton, Thomas; Price, William
Lake; Towler, John; Niépce, Joseph Nicéphore;
Monckhoven, Désiré Charles Emanuel Van; and
Daguerre, Louis-Jacques-Mandé.
Further Reading
Gernsheim, Helmut, The Incunabula of British Photographic
Literature, 1839–1875. London and Berkeley: Scholar Press,
1984.
Henisch, Heinz K., and Henisch, Bridget A., The Photographic
Experience 1839–1914. University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1994.
Johnson, William S, Nineteenth Century Photography, an Anno-
tated Bibliography, 1839–1879. London: Mansell, 1990.
BOOKS AND MANUALS ABOUT
PHOTOGRAPHY: 1870s
In the chapter ‘The Future of Photography,’ in Gaston
Tissandier’s History and Handbook of Photography,
published in 1875 with a second edition three years
later, the author suggested, “The day may perhaps come
when the negative will be taken at a distance by means
of the electric wire; and if some reader exclaims Impos-
sible, I shall refer him to certain telegraphic systems,
lately discovered, which allow us to anticipate this
new miracle.” The book’s translator and editor of the
English-language edition, John Thomson, offered, as a
footnote, the observation, “I believe that there is noth-
ing Utopian in the notion that, ere long, means will be
discovered of telegraphing a photograph from one end
of the earth to the other.”
While Thomson and Tissandier were both very per-
ceptive in their view of the future, the book’s historical
section is somewhat of a curiosity, perpetuating several
misunderstandings and over-simplifi ed accounts of the
early years. One surprise inclusion for the 1878 second
edition, given the late date, was an essay by William
Henry Fox Talbot on the introduction of photogenic
drawing and the calotype, and an essay on the photo-
glyphic process by Talbot’s son, the inventor having
died the previous year. Two years earlier, Tissandier had
published Les merveilles de la photographie in Paris.
The 1870s was the decade of transition from home-
made wet and dry plate photography, to commercially
produced materials. Paper photography had all but
disappeared by the mid 1860s and, in Britain, Bolton
& Sayce had pioneered emulsion-based plate technol-
ogy, and companies such as the Liverpool Dry Plate
Company, J.T. Chapman in Manchester and others had
entered the market. Thus many of the publications pro-
duced during the decade in both Europe and America
were small books or pamphlets produced by the emerg-
ing plate-making industry to promote the effective use
of their own products.
Gernsheim in his Incunabula of British Photographic
Literature 1839–1875 lists three such publications in
the fi rst two years of the decade—George Dawson’s
The Russell Dry Plates (1871), The Liverpool Dry Plate
Company’s Rapid Collodio-Bromide Plates (1872),
Mawson & Swan’s On the Collodio-Bromide Process
(1872)—and these serve as typical exemplars of the ma-
terial being published in other parts of the world as well.
That transition rendered most of the earlier manuals out
of date, and signalled the need for both major revisions
of earlier texts, and entirely new manuals refl ecting the
new era of photographic manipulation.
Two books from Dr Hermann Wilhelm Vogel, the
discoverer of dye sensitisation and orthochromatic
emulsions amongst other things, appeared during the
1870s—his Handbook of the Practice and Art of Pho-
tography fi rst appeared in German in 1870, with an
English-language edition specifi cally for the American
market published in Philadelphia in the following year.
The more important volume The Chemistry of Light
and Photography in Their Application to Art, Science
and Industry was published in London in 1875, with
subsequent editions into the middle of the 1880s. Vogel
was also a prolifi c contributor of letters and opinion to
the photographic press for over a quarter of a century
until his death in 1898.
One of the major fi gures in 19th century physics,
chemistry and photographic theory, William de Wive-
leslie Abney, privately published the fi rst edition of his
book Instruction in Photography for Use at the SchoolBOOKS AND MANUALS ABOUT PHOTOGRAPHY: 1870s