Rare books, manuscripts, music, ephemera…
5th November 2015
Just over a year ago, I wrote about the first photographic manual in the world, written in 1839 by the Austrian writer Karl von Frankenstein (1810–1848). I’d love to find another copy of that book, but I shall have to content myself for the moment with this, a complete run of the first year of a journal Frankenstein […]
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30th October 2014
This little book (it measures only 138 × 108 mm), ‘The Secret of taking Daguerreotypes, or the Art of producing Photogenic Pictures with a Camera Obscura’, has been described as ‘the first photographic manual in the world’ (Gernsheim, Concise History of Photography (third edition, p. 11), and is also the first German publication on photography. The year 1839 […]
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