52 Weeks of Inspiring Illustrations, Week 6: Nasmyth’s “Moon” images

speccoll
Monday 30 July 2012
Plate XXII from the first edition (1874) of James Nasmyth’s The moon.
James Nasmyth, c. 1877, from Men of Mark by Lock and Whitfield  (Photo CT782.C7).

This week’s illustration post brings together two wonders of the 19th century industrial imagination: amateur astronomy and photography. Photography had become successful and popular by the mid-19th century both professionally and amongst “gentleman scientists” looking to add to and make their mark on popular knowledge. James Nasmyth was such a man: he showed an early competency for mechanics, set up his own foundry, designed and patented the steam hammer and other machines and retired at the age of 48 to Kent to pursue his hobby of astronomy.

Once retired Nasmyth, as an industrial gentleman of the steam age, built his own 20-inch reflecting telescope (now on display at the Science Museum in London) and joined the ranks of Democritus, da Vinci, Galileo and Johannes Hevelius as an amateur selenographer. Thus he embarked on a series of lunar observations which finally culminated in the 1874 publication of a work by him and James Carpenter entitled The moon: considered as a planet, a world, and a satellite (London, John Murray).

From left to right: the front cover, title page and Plate IV from the first edition (1874) of James Nasmyth’s The moon.
Plate III from the first edition, a copy of a lunar photograph by Warren De la Rue.

This work was advertised as including “twenty-four illustrative plates of lunar objects” and was significant as it was one of the first books to feature photographs of the Moon’s surface, or so it seems! Astrophotography had its beginnings in the 1840s (with the first photograph of the Moon being a daguerreotype by John W. Draper that took over a half-an-hour to expose) but by the 1870s there was no photographic process in place to capture the details of the lunar surface that Nasmyth and Carpenter were observing. So this pair of enterprising gentlemen set forth and built a series of plaster models based on their observations, lit them with raking light and produced photographic illustrations for their book. In fact, in the whole of their book there is only one photograph of the actual Moon, which was taken by Warren De la Rue (Plate III of the first edition, right).

Plate IX from the first edition (1874) of The moon, by James Nasmyth and James Carpenter.
Plate XVII from the first edition (1874) of The moon, by James Nasmyth and James Carpenter.

The illustrative plates of this first edition of The moon employ multiple different types of illustrative and early photographic reproduction techniques: engravings, woodburytypes and heliotypes (a type of collotype). These new photo-mechanical printing techniques allowed a more standard print process using permanent carbon-based inks and stream-lined the production of photographically illustrated books.

Plate XXIII from the first edition (1874) of The moon, a Heliotype of an ‘ideal lunar landscape’.

This process truly underlines photography’s basic characteristic of being a construct (in this instance twice over!) and very much an act of interpretation which can sometimes be far from the truth. This is illustrated even furthermore by the third edition of this work which can now also be found in our Photographic Books Collection. Many of the images which appear as heliotypes in the first edition are instead reproduced here as woodburytypes and show significant amounts of touching-up and repositioning. For example: Plate II from the first edition has instead been divided up into Plates II and III in the third edition (possibly due to the third edition’s smaller size), and both of these images along with Plate XIX (XVIII in the third edition) have been cleaned up considerably (see below).

An example of the editing of images from the first edition (1874) and the third edition (1885) of James Nasmyth’s The moon. The first edition (above) combines both photographs as one plate, a Heliotype. The third edition (below) separates each photograph onto its own plate, inverts both images and are printed as woodburytypes.

This is a fascinating book by an industrious pair of “gentlemen astronomer,” and even more so when the first and third edition are compared. Unfortunately, the Library does not currently have the second edition (translated into German, printed in Leipzig) to further comparison, but it could soon be a new addition to our collections!

DG

Photograph of the “Bute” building, part of the South Street complex, after being bombed on 25 October 1940 (from the Photographic Collection GMC-5-22-1).

As post-script, I wanted to point out that the third edition is also the first book that I’ve found that has identifiable evidence of surviving the 1940 bombing of St Andrews. On the night of 25 October 1940, a bomb was dropped on South Street which damaged many of the buildings in St Mary’s Quad, including the “Bute” building, pictured left, and the University Library. Hundreds of shards of glass had to be removed from the spines of books during the clean-up, but during my first two years here I had not seen evidence of this in any of our existing books. The third edition of Nasmyth’s moon has a black ink-stamp on the back fly-leaf that reads: “Bomb-1940 [maltese cross] F” and the spine shows evidence of significant repair. This find adds another layer of provenance to these already exciting books!

The black-ink stamp on the back of the third edition (1885) of The moon, showing that it suffered some damage in the October 1940 bombing of St Andrews.

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9 thoughts on "52 Weeks of Inspiring Illustrations, Week 6: Nasmyth’s “Moon” images"

  • The Starry Messenger: two rare books head to Wales for a day in the limelight | Echoes from the Vault
    Friday 22 March 2013, 2.25pm

    [...] and his team had come across my blog post for Week 6 of our “52 Weeks of Inspiring Illustrations” thread while looking around for information about [...]

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  • The Moon as Imagined in 1874 « adafruit industries blog
    Tuesday 7 May 2013, 8.43pm

    [...] and vivid imaginations. Hence James Nasmyth’s and James Carpenter’s 1874 publication The Moon:  Considered As A Planet, a World and a Satellite [...]

    Reply
  • NASMYTH’S ART | IMechE Archive and Library
    Monday 21 October 2013, 11.31am

    […] a Satellite where these photographs were published (good images and more information is available here). The model is viewable at the Science Museum, in their ‘Making the Modern World’ […]

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  • Book conservation at ADML: "The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite" | The ADM Library Blog (NEW)
    Tuesday 30 December 2014, 4.07am

    […] interpretation! While the physical book is being preserved at ADM Library, some of its plates are available online. The library is working with a faculty member to digitize all of the book’s plates, which will […]

    Reply
  • Assignment 3: Chiaroscuro: Newton’s apple series 1 | Unquiet Thing
    Sunday 27 September 2015, 3.19am

    […] The Moon considered as a Planet, a World and a Satellite […]

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  • Peter Lloyd
    Peter Lloyd
    Tuesday 13 August 2019, 7.17pm

    You say you do not have a copy of the second edition of Nasmyth and Carpenter's book. I have a copy as a bound paperback. Sadly I don't remember where I bought it, but not Amazon. So it is available, but maybe it is an original you are after. Peter Lloyd.

    Reply
    • St Andrews Special Collections
      St Andrews Special Collections
      Wednesday 14 August 2019, 11.39am

      Hi Peter, thanks for your comment. I have passed your offer to our Rare Books Librarian who will be in touch.

      Reply
  • Liz Shannon
    Liz Shannon
    Tuesday 15 October 2019, 5.25pm

    Great post - love this book and fascinated by the detail about the bombing. I had no idea. Thank you!

    Reply
    • St Andrews Special Collections
      St Andrews Special Collections
      Tuesday 15 October 2019, 5.30pm

      We are glad to hear you enjoyed the post. Thanks!

      Reply

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