The Pencil Of Nature: history's first commercial book of photography -- reborn

On the left: our Curator of Photographic Technology, Colin Harding. On the right: Daniel Kirkpatrick of Chicago/London book publishers KWS. Two men with one very special plan: bring back to life one of the the world's most historically important photographically-illustrated books.

The Pencil Of Nature was published in six instalments between June 1844 and April 1846 by William Henry Fox Talbot. It was a real milestone: the first ever commercially-published book to be illustrated with photographs, coming just a few years after Talbot himself invented the calotype process -- the foundation of modern photography.

Photography was so new in the 1840s that the book was very much an explanation of, and manifesto for, the whole idea of photography. Talbot had to explain things we take for granted today -- such as the fact that, unlike a hand-painted portrait, putting more people in the frame doesn't increase the time it takes to create the picture.

Most copies of The Pencil Of Nature around the world -- and only around 400 copies were ever actually sold -- are deteroriating. But thanks to our Museum's unrivalled collection of both Talbot's original prints and copies of the instalments themselves, Harding and Kirkpatrick are recreating The Pencil Of Nature page by page. It's been republished before as an expensive collector's edition, but this is a new opportunity for libraries, schools and photography enthusiasts to own a piece of history, affordably. (You can register your interest now at KWS's website.)

It's a painstaking process. There are two kinds of pages in The Pencil Of Nature: the photographs themselves (which were physically bound into the book), and printed text. The text pages don't need any work done -- we can use them straight. For the photographic plates, Harding and Curator of Collections Access Brian Liddy (above) select the best prints from the many original Talbot calotypes we have in our collection. These are the actual 1840s prints that were destined to be placed into copies of the original book.

In some cases, the images vary across different editions of The Pencil Of Nature. There's scaffolding in one photo from an early edition; in a later edition, the scaffolding's gone. So it's not always a simple choice.

Once the calotypes are chosen, Paul Thompson, our Collections Photographer, takes charge of the scanning process. We have a bank of LED lights that we shine on the prints to illuminate them; the heat and ultra-violet light from normal lighting setups would damage those ever-fragile calotypes. It's a quick process, and we don't wade in with Photoshop afterwards -- the idea is to recreate the original perfectly without touching up imperfections.

The Pencil Of Nature should be on sale soon. Paul's scanning the final batch of photographs on Friday -- check back here next week and I'll hopefully have some video for you, and some more Talbot-related collection gems.

Volunteers' Day

Whereas people like me get paid "handsomely" for our jobs here at the Museum, there's an army of unsung helpers who volunteer their services for free -- and whose work in Collections and elsewhere keeps the Museum running efficiently.

Tuesday in Collections is 'library volunteers day'. A dozen or so people from the local area arrive at Insight at 10am, and spend the morning cataloguing the vast number of unlabelled, unsorted books that are shelved in our Collections library. That means opening each book, scribbling the details onto a form, filing the book, then entering the details into our digital database. For hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of books.









One such volunteer is Betty (third from left in the picture above), who's old enough to remember saving up for a Brownie camera, and who's been a Museum volunteer since 2004. She's the one who brings the biscuits for everyone to nibble on during the mid-morning tea break. So far Betty's catalogued books about everything from TV, to film, to photography. But she tends to avoid the more gruesome photography books. "I don't like all that blood and guts," she says. "Not when I've just had a chocolate biscuit."

The books come from all over: personal donations, the University Of Newcastle, our Kaszna Krausz Collection, and elsewhere. Some books are well-thumbed, others have never been opened. Betty might be leafing through the pages of a book that's worth pennies -- or hundreds of pounds.

In the library itself, where some of our little team were busy filing the catalogued books, I found another volunteer: Pamela. She was dutifully cataloguing our collection of Portfolio, the magazine of contemporary photography. The magazine is having a back issues sale and we're considering filling the gaps in our collection -- but first we need to find out what we do and don't have. That's Pamela's job today.









No-one's more grateful for the volunteers' help than Brian Liddy, our Curator of Collections Access. "They make my life so much easier," he says. "And the cataloguing means that researchers stand a much better chance of finding the kind of books they're searching for."

The mammoth task of cataloguing our collection continues. If you'd like to join our team of volunteers, do call us on 0870 70 10 200.