The term “calotype” is from the Greek kalos meaning beautiful. It is the name given to Fox Talbot‘s negative process. The name is often mistakenly applied to photographic “salted paper” prints (positives) which have…
“Drawings made by a black fellow at Corowa New South Wales June 1886. His name I do not know. By the whites he goes by the name of Tommy Macrae…He is quite self-taught at drawing.” This is the handwritten note on an…
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…
Last year, we started an experiment here at Echoes to create a post once a week focused on fantastic bindings found throughout the collections. This year-long thread was a great success: not only did it attract a lot…
Earlier this year, Howard S. Mott, Inc. brought to our attention a book from their stock which would fit our collection very nicely. The book in question was the very rare and fragile printing of Sir R.L. Playfair’s An…
I’ve selected one of the true beauties of our collections for the second-to-last binding post of this series. It is no surprise that many of the binding posts featured this year were from sacred or devotional texts…
This week’s binding feature focusses on an item from a collection that has not yet been discussed here: the Photographic Collection. St Andrews University Library holds one of the largest and most important collections…
With the last three weeks of this binding series already planned to jam-packed with historic “wow”-pieces, I decided to go for something a bit more personal and casual for this week’s binding gem. I came across this…
Now, I’ve seen a fair number of books with gauffered edges in my time, however this one takes the cake. This week’s binding post was discovered while I was fetching a different book for a reader, I just happened to…
This week’s binding post is a heavy-weight from the Alchemy Collection. It is found on the 1561 Officina Frobeniana printing of Georg Agricola’s De re metallica libri XII. This book is the second edition of Agricola’s…