190
Castles of Great Britain published in 1862. However,
this format remained uncommon.
Photographic publishers adopted a number of stan-
dard publishing marketing strategies. One was the use
of pre-publication subscription, particularly for deluxe
titles. The part work or serial was another hallmark of
photographically illustrated publications. Frequently,
once a full year of a serial had been published the parts
were given a special title page, bound as individual vol-
umes—often available in a variety of different bindings
and sold to the Christmas market. These approaches
were a mixture of the practical issues and challenges
inherent in the nascent mass production techniques,
marketing strategies to attract a wide range of buyers
and attempts to limit fi nancial liabilities. Thus prices
of photographically illustrated books could range from
a couple of shillings to several guineas. Nevertheless,
from the 1860s advertisements in periodicals chronicle
the path of unsold stock, via price reductions, remain-
dering and specialist auction houses offering the entire
remaining stock of photographically illustrated books
that had failed to sell.
Photographic publishers exploited the 19th century
fascination for celebrity and biography. A total of some
125 portraits by A.A.E. Disdéri were published in Paris
between 1860 and 1863 under the title Galerie des Con-
temporains. Some 144 portrait photographs by Ernest
Edwards were co-published in London by Lovell Reeve
and A.W. Bennett between 1863 and 1867 under the title
Portraits of Men of Eminence in Literature, Science and
Art. Other portraits by Edwards were published between
1865 and 1868 by Churchill in London as Photographs
of Eminent Medical Men of all countries. The work
of another leading portrait photographer—John Jabez
Edwin Mayall—was published between 1867 and 1868
as Mayall’s celebrities of the London Stage, a series of
photographic portraits in character.
The photographically illustrated publications on
works of fi ne and decorative art and architecture prolifer-
ated during the 1860s. The reproduction of engravings
after paintings was common, though by the end of the
1860s photographic art publishers such as Adolphe
Braun of Dornach began to photograph directly from
paintings. Braun’s Carbon prints of the frescoes of
the Sistine Chapel published in 1869 form one of the
landmarks in the infl uence of photography to change
art historical scholarship.
In Great Britain photographic publishers included
Samson Low, Bell & Daldy, A.W. Bennett, Day &
Son, Seeley, Jackson & Halliday and Bickers & Son.
Specialist art societies, such as the Arundel Society, also
played a key role and in the late 1860s and early 1870s
this society collaborated with the South Kensington
Museum and the Department of Science and Art in a
series of photographic publications titled Art Workman-
ship of Various Ages and Countries.
The 1860s also saw the limited introduction of a
number of permanent photographic and photomechani-
cal processes that were applied to book illustration.
The Carbon print and the Woodburytype are particular
examples. An advantage of the Carbon process was that
the pigments that formed the photographic image could
be tinted as a single colour. The Autotype Company,
founded in Brixton in south London in 1868, became a
key promoter of the Carbon process both as a printer and
publisher of photographically illustrated books.
Photozincography was exploited by the Ordnance
Survey Offi ce in Southampton to reproduce the Domes-
day Book and other historic manuscripts. Photolithogra-
phy began to be used to reproduce graphic art and line
drawings in a variety of publications, including books,
serials and periodicals.
Early examples of photogravure began to appear in
the late 1860s such as Eduard Baldus’ Palais du Louvre
et des Tuileries that commenced publication in 1869.
By the later part of the 1860s photographic illustra-
tion had already encompassed a very wide range of
human activity from medical treatises to local history. It
ranged from cheap consumer titles, through de luxe vol-
umes for the rich collector to the periodicals of scholarly
societies, though this latter area was not large-scale.
Anthony Hamber
See Also: Galerie Contemporaine (1876–1884); and
Braun, Adolphe.Further Reading
Armstrong, Carol. Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph
in the Book, 1843–75. MIT Press. Boston, 1998.
Gernsheim, H., Incunabula of British Photographic Literature
1839–1875, 1984.
Heidtmann, F., Wie das Photo ins Buch Kam, 1984.
Parr, Martin and Gerry Badger. The Photobook: A History: v. 1.
Phaidon Press Ltd. London, 2004.
Wilson, J., Photography and the Printed Page in the Nineteenth
Century (exh. cat.), 2001.BOOKS ILLUSTRATED WITH
PHOTOGRAPHS: 1870s
The ‘golden age’ of photographically illustrated publica-
tions of the 1860s was consolidated during the 1870s.
The number of photographically illustrated publications
continued to rise, and compared to the 1860s probably
by a factor of more than three times. However, the com-
mercial success of photographically illustrated publica-
tions during the 1870s, and how this market was affected
by the serious economic recession in the middle of the
decade, has yet to be fully evaluated.BOOKS ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS: 1860s