Curated by Bruce Cammack
Fabricated by Lyn Stoll

October 2001, SWC            

                                    THE TRUTHFUL PAGE
                            Early Photographic Illustrated Books

The early 1800’s saw considerable interest in the development of new photographic technologies.
Much of the incentive behind these experimentations was to produce, on a commercial scale,
illustrations that were more accurate than those that could be made with engravings or lithographs.
By 1839 William Fox Talbot, an English politician turned scientist, was able to capture images
upon paper coated with both silver nitrate and sodium chloride. These salt prints, which were
highly susceptible to fading, gave way in the mid-1850’s to albumen prints, which used egg white
to bond the photosensitive chemicals to the paper.

Publishing books with mounted salt prints or albumens was still a slow and expensive process and
publishers eagerly sought alternatives.  The 1867 patented woodburytypes, which relied on a lead
mold, could be produced in numbers as high as 120 prints an hour and then bound directly into a
publication. A few years later, collotypes were developed, a process in which several photographs
could be printed on a single sheet using one glass plate.  These and other photo-engraving processes
were surpassed in the early 1880’s by the photogravure process which produced a copper plate with
finely-grained relief.

The books in this exhibit are from Texas Tech University’s Rare Books and Southwest Collection. 
Long unrecognized for their historic and artistic importance, many of the early photographically-illustrated books in the Rare Books Photographic Collection were only recently discovered in the Library’s general circulating collection.