179
British edition, at 236 pages was substantially smaller
that the more heavily illustrated American edition (294
pp.) published in the following year (New York: S.
D. Humphrey). Humphrey, as editor of the American
edition, was personally responsible for additional text
specifi cally related to American practice.
If there was a restraining infl uence on the expansion
of the library of photographic literature, it was the high
cost of books in the mid nineteenth century. At six shil-
lings, Hunt’s Manual of Photography cost over half the
average weekly income of a skilled artisan, placing it
well beyond the reach of all but the affl uent. Photogra-
phy at the time was still the pursuit of those in society
with suffi cient funds and suffi cient leisure time. To un-
derline that exclusivity, membership of the Photographic
Society of London cost one guinea— twenty-one shil-
lings per year. Joseph Cundall’s 32 page very basic
booklet The Photographic Primer for the use of Begin-
ners in the Collodion Process (London: Photographic
Institution 1854) was available for one shilling, or one
shilling and sixpence by post. In advertisements for this
book, a selling point was that it contained “A fac-simile
(sic!) of a Photographic Picture of Birds, showing the
difference of Tone produced by various Colours.” This
was probably the fi rst attempt to explore visually the
impact of the collodion plate’s blue sensitivity of tone
reproduction.
It is a measure of the expanding photographic market
that it could sustain so many practical manuals. In ad-
dition to Hunt, manuals were written by several other
eminent photographers and writers.
Philip Delamotte’s The Practice of Photography: A
Manual for Students and Amateurs (London: Joseph
Cundall, 1853) went to three editions—the second pub-
lished in 1854 and the third in 1855 (London: Sampson
Low and Son). An American edition appeared in 1854
(New York: Offi ce of the Photographic and Fine Art
Journal). Each edition was embellished with an albu-
men print from a collodion negative as frontispiece.
For the 1855 edition, this was one of Delamotte’s own
photographs of the interior of the Crystal Palace at
Sydenham.
Marcus (William) Sparling, Roger Fenton’s as-
sistant during the Crimean War contributed his only
publication Theory and Practice of the Photographic
Art (London: Houlston and Stoneman, 1856), while
Robert J. Bingham—who periodically promoted himself
as the “inventor of the collodion process”—produced a
new edition of his Photogenic Manipulation (London:
Knight and Sons) in 1854. The fi rst edition had appeared
in 1848 and went to eleven editions in total. Worthy
of note here is the observation by Charles Heisch in
Photographic Manuals No.1 (London: T and R Wil-
lats, 1853) that the fi rst publication of a workable wet
collodion process was probably by Gustave le Gray
in June 1850 in A Practical Treatise on Photography
Upon paper and Glass translated by Thomas Cousens
and published in English a few weeks later (London: T
and R Willats). Heisch himself noted that he had fi rst
heard collodion suggested as a possible carrier for the
light-sensitive chemistry as early as 1847. The widely
acknowledged inventor of a detailed practical collodion
process, Frederick Scott Archer—who dismissed both
le Gray’s and Bingham’s claims as nothing more than
‘ideas’—produced his own volume, A Manual of the
Collodion Process, in 1852 (London: self published)
and a second edition, retitled The Collodion Process on
Glass (London: self published), in 1854.
Amongst more specialised books, Sir David Brew-
ster’s The Stereoscope, Its History, Theory and Con-
struction (London: John Murray, 1856) is signifi cant
—the fi rst major publication to deal exclusively with
stereoscopy and stereo vision.
The earliest attempt to publish a photographic ency-
clopaedia was Henry Hunt Snelling’s A Dictionary of
the Photographic Art (New York: H. H. Snelling, 1854)
published jointly with Edward Anthony’s Comprehen-
sive and Systematic Catalogue of Photographic Appa-
ratus and Material; Manufactured, Imported and Sold
by E. Anthony, 308 Broadway New York This volume
was reprinted in 1979 as part of the Arno Press series
The Sources of Modern Photography, which series also
reprinted Anton Georg Martin’s 1854 Handbuch der
gesammten Photographie, Ernest Lacan’s Esquisses
Photographiques (Paris, 1856) and Claude Marie
François Niépce de Saint Victor’s 1855 Recherches
Photographiques (Paris, 1855). Arno’s earlier 1973
series The Literature of Photography reprinted many
of the early manuals and handbooks of photography
from the 1850s and 1860s, including A. Bisbee’s His-
tory and Practice of the Daguerreotype (Dayton, Ohio,
1853). While more common that the originals, many of
the Arno reprints have themselves acquired signifi cant
scarcity in the thirty years since their publication.
John HannavySee Also: Delamotte, Philip Henry; Sparling,
Marcus William; Fenton, Roger; Bingham,
Robert J.; Le Gray, Gustave; Archer, Frederick Scott;
Brewster, Sir David; Snelling, Henry Hunt; and
Anthony, EH & T.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: Penn-
sylvania State University Press, 1994.
Johnson, William S, Nineteenth–1879 London: Mansell, 1990.BOOKS AND MANUALS ABOUT PHOTOGRAPHY: 1850s