The Daguerreotype in America.
New York Graphic Society, 1968. Revised Edition
by Newhall, Beaumont.
New York Graphic Society, 1968. Revised Edition. Quarto, yellow cloth (hardcover), gilt letters, 176 pp. Very Good+, with light foxing, in a Good+ dust jacket with light edgewear. From dust jacket: The Daguerreotype in America is the lavishly and beautifully illustrated history of the earliest days of photography, from the discovery of Daguerre to the complete acceptance of the new art in America. From 1839 to the outbreak of the Civil War, thousands of daguerreotypes were taken all over the United States. There was not a city that did not boast one or more “Daguerrian Artists,” and not a village or hamlet unvisited by the traveling daguerreotypist. In Massachusetts alone, half a million daguerreotypes were taken in the space of eighteen months. Americans were so enamored of Daguerre’s invention, that upon his death the dageurreotypists of New York City voted to wear mourning in his honor. The Dageurreotype in America is the result of fourteen years of research, during which Beaumont Newhall searched historical societies, museums, libraries, and private collections, for the finest examples of thees brilliant, yet forgotten, pictorial documents of America in the 1849s and 1850s. He found not only portraits but city views, locomotives, ships at sea, trades. From city directories, contemporary jounrals, unpublished letters and manuscripts, he has compiled a narrative account of the art and industry of daguerreotyping, and a detailed acocunt of how daguerreotypes were made. Eighty-three illustrations, for the most part unpublished, are reproduced in brilliant facsimile, and the text is embellished with line cuts of the period. The book contains, besides extensive notes and a bibliography, documented biographical sketches of 171 of America’s pioneer photographers, from Dan Adams of Tennessee to Anthony Zuky of New York. (Inventory #: 60811bd)