Collecting Nineteenth-Century Books with Photographs

In the years before photographs could be reproduced in ink alongside letterpress text, some publishers experimented with photographic illustration by pasting original photographs into books. Most of these books went unnoticed in library collections and used bookseller shops until a sudden interest in photography and photographic history in the 1970s turned the attentions of librarians, scholars, curators, and collectors to the treasure trove of historical photography that could be found between the pages of a book. Since that time, only a few institutions with an interest in photography have attempted to identify and promote these materials, despite the fact that these books may reside in the stacks of any institution with holdings dating back to the nineteenth century. This article considers the reasons why this may have happened, primarily by examining the attitudes toward collecting nineteenth-century photographically illustrated books that emerged in the late twentieth century.