HIDDEN CORNERS
early PHOTOGRAPHY in focus The Library’s collection includes some rare and interesting landmarks of photographic history, as Louis Porter has discovered Hunting for books on early photography in The London Library requires the appetite and alert faculties that I assume come naturally to a truffle pig. The back stacks, like the dark oak forests of Périgord so loved by French truffle hunters, conceal the greatest treasures, and the best of these can generally be found away from the designated areas. For example, Alex Richardson’s remarkable Vickers Sons and Maxim, Limited: Their Works and Manufactures (1902) can be found on the folio shelves of S. Engineering. Photographs of artillery demonstrations conducted by men in pristine white uniforms, views of cavernous factory workshops assembling the ‘Maxim’ and ‘Pom-Pom’ guns that would soon churn flesh and soil on the fields of Europe, and scientific images of armour plating tests, are all rendered with extraordinary clarity. One afternoon, hunting in Topography, I discovered a copy of Heinrich Schliemann’s Atlas Trojanischer Alterthümer: Photographische Abbildungen (1874, T. Asia Minor, Troy, folio), which details Schliemann’s discovery of, among other things, ‘Priam’s Treasure’ . The two volumes of albumen prints include photographs of drawings, dig sites and collections of silver vases, goblets, copper lance-heads and a variety of other artefacts from ancient Troy arranged neatly on shelves, with object numbers carefully inscribed into the glass photographic plates. These arrangements are both scientific records and spectacles of plunder, a nineteenth-century precursor to the Haul videos that proliferate on YouTube today. The prints themselves in Schliemann’s book are surprisingly crude. The albumen 16 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
print was the first truly mass-produced form of photography, finding its way into millions of homes throughout the world. Despite the scale of production, albumen prints were hand made, a sheet of thin cotton rag coated with salted egg white and silver nitrate. When pasted into books the prints were often part of sumptuous editions, frequently sold in instalments by subscription. The Atlas Trojanischer Alterthümer, however, is an exercise in how not to make a photographic book, a mess of wonky, mis-trimmed and poorly coated prints, as if Schliemann in an attempt to save money had done the job himself, at night, in the
dark. Although poorly realised, the book has a sense of authenticity that a more pristine creation lacks. I wonder, briefly, if the black soot that clings to the pages of these volumes has come from an ancient terracotta amphora and is not just dust dislodged from the top of one of the veins of mysterious piping that run through the back stacks. The S. Photography section itself spans a respectable six shelves in Science and Miscellaneous (one more than its neighbour, S. Petroleum). Pedagogic manuals on photographic techniques, encyclopaedias and numerous works of cultural theory dominate the shelfmark.
