193
promoted as a souvenir, available at three locations at
the World’s Columbian Exposition. A Girl I Know is an
homage to Bartlett’s teenage-daughter Madelon shown
in cap and gown on the occasion of her graduation. Each
of Bartlett’s books was published in an edition of 500 by
Joseph Knight Company of Boston who appears to have
been a major producer of the children’s book genre.
Photographically illustrated children’s books appear
to have been authored equally by men and women.
Alexander Black produced at least a half-dozen in the
1890s; his Captain Kodak: A Camera Story published
in 1899 references the craze for amateur snapshot pho-
tography. In addition to Black, two of the more highly
recognized photographers producing books related to
children’s themes were Lewis Carroll, The Story of
Lewis Carroll (1899), and Rudolf Eickemeyer, In and
Out of the Nursery (1899).
The idea of combining photography with poetic verse
was taken up by Helen E. Stevenson when she published
a book, Pictures from Nature and Life (1894) of her
photographs coupled with poetry written by her twin
sister, Kate Raworth Holmes. In part a personal diary
the book appears intended for a very private audience
yet some of the themes are universal. The images recall
the sisters’ personal experiences traveling to romantic
castles in England, a pair of happy lovers, a young bride
dressed for her wedding day, and a mother cradling her
child. Dedicated to their mother, the sister’s drawing-
room book offers a sentimental view of family life.
The late nineteenth-century interest in all things
japonisme reached its apogee in the Mikado edition of
J.B. Millet Company’s Japan: Described and Illustrated
by the Japanese published in Boston between 1897
and 1898. Possibly the last great book to be illustrated
entirely by original photographs, the ten folio volumes,
sumptuously bound in Japanese silk brocade and lace
are illustrated with a plethora of tipped-in photographs.
Published in 250 copies, each set featured ten brilliant
full-page color collotypes of Japanese fl owers by Ogawa
Isshin (1860–1929), sixty full-page hand-colored albu-
men prints individually mounted and matted with tinted,
and some two-hundred smaller hand colored albumen
prints mounted within the text. This enormously com-
plex publishing project was at once a summation of the
cultural and political interchange between Japan and
American in the late nineteenth century.
Margaret Denny
See Also: Emerson, Peter Henry; Dodgson,
Charles Lutwidge (Carroll, Lewis); and Women
Photographers.
Further Reading
Bethel, Denise, “Study of Japan: Described and Illustrated by
the Japanese” in Image 34: 1–2, 1991: 3–21.
Robinson, William F., A certain slant of light: the fi rst hundred
years of New England photography, Boston, Mass.: New York
Graphic Society, 1980.
Sandweiss, Martha A., Print the Legend: Photography and the
American West, New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 2002.
White, Mus. From the mundane to the magical: photographi-
cally illustrated children’s books, 1854–1945, Los Angeles:
Dawson’s Book Shop, 1999.BOOL, ALFRED (1844–1926) AND JOHN
(1850–1933)
Studio owners
The Bool brothers, Alfred Henry & John James opened
two studios in London’s Pimlico in the 1860s. In
1875 they were commissioned by Alfred Marks (1833
–1912) to take the initial series of negatives for the
newly established Society for Photographing Relics of
Old London. Each series consisted of 6 carbon prints,
specially printed by the fi rm of Henry Dixon. Series 1,
1875, contained views of the Oxford Arms coaching
inn; Series 21876, views of Lincoln’s Inn; Series 31877
views in the Smithfi eld area; Series 4 views of Temple
Bar & Gray’s Inn Lane.
From Series 5 1879, however, both negatives and
prints were made by Dixon alone. Each series was
increased to 12 prints, and from 1881 brief texts were
included with subscribers’ copies.
Alfred Bool died in Wimbledon on December 91926;
he was an early advocate of women’s employment in
photography. John Bool continued the brothers’ Pimlico
studio on his own until 1918; he died on the premises
on December 14 1933.
David WebbBOTANICAL PHOTOGRAPHY
A true history of botanical photography begins well
before the 19th century, and even before the invention
of photography as we know it. The desire for nature to
be able to reproduce itself is ancient. Often credited with
the one of the fi rst observations of this phenomenon,
Aristotle, during an eclipse, described seeing an image
of the sun projected through tree leaves onto the ground.
Acting as a primitive camera obscura, nature seemed
to act out the title and philosophy of one of the earliest
photographic books, “The Pencil of Nature.”
As photography literally means “sun writing,” it is
no surprise then that some of its earliest subjects were
of a botanical nature. A British scientist and one of
photography’s earliest practitioners, William Henry
Fox Talbot (1800–77), used fl owers during his fi rst
experiments. As he wrote to a botanist friend about his
discovery, “I believe that this new art will be a great