For the seminal publication, Traité pratique de gravure héliographique sur acier et sur verre (A Practical Treatise on Photogravure Engraving on Steel and on Glass) by Niépce de Saint-Victor (1805-1870), either he or his publisher commissioned a portrait for the frontispiece.
To further celebrate Niépce’s important discoveries in photographic printing, they made the portrait using his own process: “Gravure héliographique d’après une photographie sur acier selon les procédés de Niépce de Ste Victor” (Photogravure engraving after a photograph on steel, according to the methods of Niépce de Ste Victor).
Claude-Félix-Abel Niépce de Saint-Victor (1805-1870), Traité pratique de gravure héliographique sur acier et sur verre / par M. Niépce de Saint-Victor (Paris: Librairie de V. Masson, 1856). Provenance: C. F. Chandler. Graphic Arts Collection 2006-3213N
Note the photograph was taken by Victor Plumier (1821-1878) and a great deal was made about the fact that he did not retouch his negative. The engraving plate was made by Madame [is it Pauline?] Riffaut and the portrait finished by Adolphe-Pierre Riffaut (1821-1859).
If you use a microscope, you will see the hand engraving on top of the aquatint done, in particular, in the beard. In addition, there are gouache highlights delicately added to the paper print in the hair and the beard.
On Tuesday February 25, 1919, Virginia Wolff wrote in her diary:
Of no 23 Cromwell Houses . . . I will only say that it is furnished on the great South Kensington principle of being on the safe side & doing the thing handsomely. Good Mrs. Samuel Bruce went to the Autotype Company & ordered the entire Dutch school to be sent round framed in fumed oak. And so they were; & just covered the staircase walls, leaving an inch or two’s margin in between. –Anne Oliver Bell, The Diary of Virginia Woolf (1980).
Founded in 1868 as the Autotype Printing and Publishing Company, several shops merged and expanded over the next few years before settling as The Autotype Company at 74 New Oxford Street, London. This fashionable address became the place to go in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to buy reproductions of fine art to hang in your home. The managing partners of this enormous operation were John Alexander Spencer (182?-1884), John Robert Mather Sawyer (1828-1881), and Walter Strickland Bird (1828-1912).
Initially, the company purchased Joseph Swan’s copyright on carbon printing and an Autotype, in general, means a carbon print. Eventually the firm added collotypes and photogravure (called Autogravure) to their roster, selling framed prints, portfolios, and bound volumes to the social elite, including some of the most beautiful books of the period.
As the quality of their prints rose to challenge the superiority of the French Goupil Company, the Autotype company advertised their ability to ‘bring Paris to London’ and to prove it, published a portfolio of ten photogravures reproducing etchings by the preeminent French printmaker Charles Meryon (1821-1868).
Charles Méryon (1821-1868), Old Paris. Ten etchings by C. Meryon. Reproduced on copper by the autogravure process and accompanied with preface and illustrative notes by Stopford A. Brooke … ([London: Autotype Co., 1887]). Rare Books and Special Collections Oversize 1514.636e
Peter Henry Emerson (1856-1936) worked with the Autotype company that same year to publish his Idyls of the Norfolk Broads (1887) but was only partially satisfied.
The following year, he was introduced Charles L. Colls at the rival Typographic Etching Company, who printed his negatives for a special edition of The Compleat Angler.
Possibly to compare the talents of the two companies, Emerson had half his negatives for Pictures of East Anglian Life (1888) printed by the Autotype Company and the other half by Type-Etching Company.
Still unsatisfied, Colls taught the photographer to make his own copper plate photogravures and from that time on, Emerson did his own printing.
Thrilling news. The Graphic Arts Collection acquired one of the remaining 1981 portfolios, Edward Steichen: The Early Years 1900-1927, published by Aperture in the United States and simultaneously at Saint-Prex, Switzerland by the Atelier de Taille Douce.
Here is a small taste but honestly, there is no digital image that reproduces the true beauty of these hand-inked and hand-pulled aquatinted and chrome-faced copper plates. The complete colophon information is reproduced below.
I asked the master printer Jon Goodman to say a few words about the project. Exerts are posted here and the complete statement can be read here: Jon Goodman steichen
Edward Steichen (1879-1973), Edward Steichen: The Early Years, 1900-1927 ([New York]: Aperture, Inc., 1981). Texts by Mary Steichen Calderone and Beaumont Newhall. Portfolio of twelve hand-pulled dust-grain photogravures printed by the master printer Jon Goodman. Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2018- in process.
“Edward Steichen: The Early Years 1900-1927 contains twelve photographic images made by means of the Talbot-Klic photogravure process. The chrome-faced copper plates were made by Jon Goodman and Richard Benson in Newport, Rhode Island. Eleven plates were made using the dust-grain technique and one plate (Three Pears and an Apple) using a specially prepared screen. The plates were hand pulled on the presses of the Atelier de Taille Douce of Saint-Prex, Switzerland. The texts by Beaumont Newhall and Mary Calderone have been set in Monotype Bembo and printed by The Stinehour Press, Lunenburg, Vermont, and are signed by the authors. The design is by Wendy Byrne. The edition is limited to one thousand examples and one hundred artist proofs. …This is number 984.” –Colophon
“The Steichen Portfolio was my first big project in photogravure,” writes Jon Goodman. “I started work on it in 1979 (I was 25). But it was a project that predated me. I was told that it was a project that Edward Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz had discussed while both were alive. In 1967 when Paul Strand’s “Mexican Portfolio” was re-editioned by Da Capo press in conjunction with a nascent Aperture (printed by Andersen Lamb Printing Co. of Brooklyn from plates made in 1939 by the Photogravure and Color Co.) Edward Steichen approached Michael Hoffman of Aperture about doing his project. . .”
Goodman continues, “I met with Michael Hoffman in New York in June of 1978 and showed him the work that I had been doing on my research which had primarily been done in Switzerland, first at the Centre Genevoise de Gravure Contemporaine and later at the Atelier de Taille Douce et Lithographie of St. Prex. He was quite interested and spoke to me about a couple of projects but primarily about the Steichen Portfolio which had been languishing for a few years.
Michael Hoffman called Richard Benson in Newport and arranged for me to go and meet with him at his home and studio. Benson had most of the equipment and facility needed to work in photogravure in his shop in Newport. He had an intaglio press that had been purchased with funds provided by Georgia O’Keeffe to make photogravures of Stieglitz’s work. I met with Benson and we arranged that I could come and work in his shop in the fall of 1978 on some of Aperture’s potential photogravure projects.”
“I returned to Newport in September of 1978 with the purpose of making some initial plates of Paul Strand’s work. I had access to Strand’s negatives through his association with Aperture and Benson had been Strand’s printer at the end of Strand’s life and knew what the images should look like. There was no funding for this work initially. It was thought that I would come to Newport for a few weeks but that turned into 3 years.
The initial Strand plates (“Gaspe’ Fisherman” and “Iris, Maine”) were a struggle. It was one thing for me to take one of my own negatives and make a photogravure plate and print but it was a whole other order of magnitude to take a negative of Paul Strand’s and make a photogravure plate and subsequent print that had a visual equivalency to Strand’s own print from that negative. The Gaspe’ Fisherman was made and editioned for the end of 1978 early 1979. Once it was established that I was a viable worker and able to try to make photogravures worthy of Paul Strand’s work and comparable to the photogravures from the Mexican Portfolio it was decided that we could proceed with the making of the Steichen Portfolio.”
“In the winter of 1979 I was sent to Munich to retrieve the material that had been provided to the printers there (Steichen’s printer had passed away by then). I had with me the “Iris” plate that I had made that fall in collaboration with Richard Benson. I asked the printers in Munich to make some proofs of that plate to take back to New York. I then went on to St. Prex Switzerland where I shared the work that I had been doing with my friends at the Atelier de Taille Douce and asked them to also proof the “Iris” plate in their manner of working.
I then took both sets of proofs of the “Iris” back to New York to show to Michael Hoffman. The difference in quality between the proofs made at the Atelier de Taille Douce and those from Munich was quite striking. There is a smoothness and a freshness to the photographic tones in the Atelier proofs while the Munich proofs were cottony and muddy. It was decided that the Atelier should edition the “Iris” plate while I went on to the making of the plates for the Steichen Portfolio.”
“It took me a full 12 months to make the 12 plates that are in the Steichen Portfolio. I learned a great deal in that time, multiple plates were made for each image before a satisfactory plate was accomplished. Then multiple proofs were made for each image, in different inks, varying both the transparency and the ink color for each. In the end after a great deal of deliberation we established the “bon a tirer” for each plate, which I then took back to the Atelier de Taille Douce in St. Prex.” Continue reading Goodman’s account here: Jon Goodman steichen
We live in an age of editions de luxe, and so bewildering nowadays is the succession of costly and elegant volumes issuing under this title from the contemporary press that it might seem a task of insuperable difficulty to assign the prize for supreme beauty to any one of them. If, however, we were bound to pronounce a judgment of Paris between the various competitors, our award would go with little hesitation in favour of the two Splendid volumes published by Messrs. Sampson Low & Co., . . .
The “Lea and Dove Edition” (the 100th) of “The Compleat Angler” is a work by which the English printing industry and publishing enterprise of the later nineteenth century might well consent to be represented before the severest aesthetic tribunal of posterity, for clear-cut beauty of typography, for sober richness of binding and decoration, for lavish wealth and artistic excellence of illustration, it is a veritable triumph of the arts which have co-operated in its production.—The Daily Telegraph 1888
In 1888 I brought out the “Lea and Dove” edition, being the hundredth edition of “The Compleat Angler,” in two volumes, small quarto, and a limited large-paper edition. My idea was to make illustrations of scenes on the rivers Lea and Dove the leading feature of this issue, and to give the text of the old classic in a style worthy, if possible, of its hundredth edition, and entirely unencumbered with notes. The text was printed from new type by Messrs. William Clowes & Sons, Limited, who took the greatest interest in the work.
The illustrations consist of about one hundred small woodcuts and fifty full-page photoengraved plates of views on the Lea and Dove—those on the Lea by Mr. P. H. Emerson, B.A., and those on the Dove by Mr. George Bankart. Possessors of this edition may at any rate rest satisfied that it will not be reprinted, as the copperplates I had transformed into boxes for keeping fly-books free from moth, and the type has been distributed. Of the reception of this edition both by the Press and the public I will only say that I was more than satisfied.
–Robert Bright Marston, Walton and Some Earlier Writers on Fish and Fishing (Firestone Z5971 .M377 1894)
Dodd, Mead & Co. have made arrangements with Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivinglon, and purchased the right in America for a limited number of a limited edition of “The Compleat Angler,” to be published this autumn.
. . . It will be known as the Lea and Dove edition. The ninety and nine editions already in the field do not deter Mr. R. B. Marston, the editor, from the idea that his firm can turn out a hundredth edition that shall have a worthy place among its predecessors. He has himself edited the ever-popular work which Charles Lamb said “might sweeten a man’s temper at any time,” and prepared biographies of Walton and Cotton for it.
The illustrations have been prepared especially for it, and depict charming scenes on Walton’s favorite rivers, which, with few exceptions, have never before appeared in the editions of Walton. There will be upwards of fifty full page photogravures, printed from copper-plates, on fine plate paper.
The quiet pastoral scenery of the river Lea is shown in a series of pictures taken by Mr. P. H. Emerson, whose fine photogravures in his works, “Life and Landscape on the Norfolk Broads” and “Peasant Life in East Anglia,” have been so much admired. The views on the rivers Dove, Wye, etc., are by Mr. George Bankart, President of the Leicester Photographic Society and one of the most successful living amateur photographers..—Publisher’s Weekly October 13, 1888.
The Publishers’ Circular and General Record of British and Foreign Literature, 51 (1888)
Izaak Walton (1593-1683), The Compleat Angler, or, The Contemplative Man’s Recreation: being a discourse of rivers fish-ponds fish and fishing written by Izaak Walton; and instructions how to angle for a trout or grayling in a clear stream by Charles Cotton; edited and arranged by R. B. Marston; with fifty-four photogravures and about 100 woodcuts; and containing a reprint of The Chronicle of the Compleat Angler, a [biblio]graphical record of its various editions and imitations by T.Westwood and T.Satchell (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1888). Copy 165 of 250. Royal Quarto Edition De Luxe. Graphic Arts Collection (GAX) Oversize 2006-0967Q
“Child Portrait” by Mr. J. Craig Annan. There is no more delightful occupation for the Kodaker than to photograph a charming child. The self-consciousness which so often spoils an otherwise capital model of more mature years is entirely absent, and the operator has full scope to exercise his skill in reproducing some of the childish graces of his dainty subject. The present picture was taken with a No. 4 Cartridge Kodak, and cut down to its present dimensions.
Introduction.
This edition de luxe of 14 photographs by eminent photographers is a souvenir of the Eastman Photographic Exhibition, held at the New Gallery, Regent Street, London, from 27th October to 16th November, 1897. It is aimed chiefly to exemplify some of the pictorial applications of the Kodak and film photography.
The pictures, without exception, are Kodak film pictures, and the assortment is specially arranged to illustrated a few of the various classes of subjects which can all be effectively exploited by Kodak photography.
Landscape, seascape, architectural pictures, portraiture pure and simple done at home, portrait head and shoulders, portraiture of three-quarter figure, portraiture of the whole figure with drawing-room surroundings, will be found pictorially exemplified in this little volume.
We wish to express our hearty thanks to the eminent photographers who have kindly lent us their film negatives, from which the fine reproductions have been made by Mr. J. Craig Annan, of Messrs. Annan & Sons.
The design stamped upon leather on the cover is by Sir David Young Cameron RA (1865-1945).
Kodak Portfolio: Souvenir of the Eastman Photographic Exhibition 1897: A Collection of Kodak Film Pictures By Eminent Photographers (London: Eastman Photographic Materials Co., Ltd.; Rochester, N.Y.: Eastman Kodak Co., [1897]). SAX in process.
This catalogue and the London exhibit featured the photographs of Henry Peach Robinson (1830-1901), W. Stoiber (active 1890s), George Davison (1854-1930), James Craig Annan (1864-1946), Eustace Calland (active 1890s), Andrew Pringle, Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864-1952), and Alfred Horsley Hinton (1863-1908). Each negative was engraved and printed in photogravure by James Craig Annan’s company Annan & Sons in Glasgow, Scotland.
Here are a few more examples from the catalogue.
“A Portrait” by Miss Frances B. Johnston. This profile portrait has been specially taken by Miss Johnston for the Kodak portfolio. It furnishes another example of the successful use of the lighting of ordinary rooms for portraiture. The textures of the different surfaces represented are effectively rendered in the picture. The photograph was taken with a No. 2 Bull’s-Eye Kodak.
“Portrait of a Lady” by Mr. J. Craig Annan. The effect obtained in this picture is, as we feel it, made up of a selection of an interesting face, a simple pose, and a pleasing decorative arrangement of figure, costume, and background. The picture was taken with a No. 4 Cartridge Kodak.
One example of the 1897 No. 4 Cartridge Kodak, the type used to make the negatives for several of these images.
“Night on a Norwegian Fjord” by Mr. Andrew Pringle. Mr. Pringle informs us that this picture was taken about 9 P.M. on a July evening on a Norwegian fjord. The boat is an old Norway lugger, and the curious lines in the water are waves formed in the wake of the steamer form which the photograph was taken. The negative was taken in a No. 4 Cartridge Kodak.
“Portrait with Interior” by Mr. J. Craig Annan. This little picture shows what can be done with the Kodak in the way of home portraiture. The complete figure is shown gracefully posed in an interesting light, and suggests a more natural portrait than one generally finds in a studio photograph. Photographers would do well to make more experiments with the lighting secured by a judicious use of their ordinary domestic rooms. The negative was taken with a No. 4 Cartridge Kodak.
“Rusthall Quarry” by Mr. H.P. Robinson. In response to a request for a note upon his picture, Mr. H. P. Robinson kindly writes as follows: This little known but very picturesque dell is part of the beautiful Rusthall Common, near Tunbridge Wells, of which it is part. Although it is most accessible it is so hidden in the hollow between the rocks of the disused quarry and some rising ground and tall trees, that few lovers of the picturesque find their way into it.
For thirty years it has been a happy hunting-ground that almost seemed my own, both for photography and natural history. I feel ashamed of appropriating so much beauty to myself, and should be glad to see other photographers at work in it. There are plenty of subjects for all. We think no one can fail to recognize in this picture a delightful effect of a kind which is associated in our minds with many beautiful old engravings. The negative was taken with a No. 4 Cartridge Kodak.
Above: New York Times February 26, 1893, p. 9. Below: New York Times February 18, 1893
February of 1893 brought terrible weather throughout the United States with the “heaviest snowfalls in years” recorded for New York City.
Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) took a day off from work at the Photochrome Engraving Company (formed after the demise of the [New York] Heliochrome Company), and famously spent several hours shooting photographs on Fifth Avenue with a hand-held camera. In particular, he captured a horse drawn coach coming towards him and then, driving away.
Back in the Photochrome studio on Leonard Street, he printed some as magic lantern slides and on April 7, 1893, presented them at the Exhibition of Lantern Slides for the Society of Amateur Photographers of New York.
“The first slides shown were by Alfred Stieglitz, comprising scenes on the Battery, the squalid localities of New York, as well as some interesting souvenirs of life on Fifth Avenue between Murray Hill and the Central Park, and several shots taken during the sloppy weather of March. They exhibited the same knowledge of what to do and how to do it that we have become accustomed to expect from the hand of this accomplished photographer.”– “Society News,” The American Amateur Photographer: A Monthly Review of Amateur Photography (New York), 5, no. 5 (May 1893).
Below: Detail from John Corbin, “The Twentieth Century City,” Scribner’s Magazine 33, no. 3 (March 1903). Over the next few years, various negatives from the blizzard were printed as photogravures, carbon prints, gelatin silver prints, and as halftone ink prints making the chronology of these iconic images and their reproductions complex. It is unfortunate that today most paper copies of the publications where they appeared are only available in digital form, leaving the identification of the ink print process impossible.
Ink prints of Stieglitz’s negatives for “Winter-Fifth Avenue” appeared in the Photographic Times, 28 (April 1896); W. I. Lincoln Adams (1865-1946), Sunlight and Shadow (New York: The Baker & Taylor company [1897]); the luxury photogravure portfolio Picturesque Bits of New York and other studies (New York: R. H. Russell, 1897); Alfred Stieglitz, “Pictorial Photography,” Scribner’s Magazine 26, no.56 (November 1899); John Corbin, “The Twentieth-Century City.” Scribner’s Magazine 33, no. 3 (March 1903); and of course, Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly 12 (October 1905). p. 7; among many others. Multiple negatives, multiple processes, multiple headaches.
Detail from W. I. Lincoln Adams (1865-1946), Sunlight and shadow (New York: The Baker & Taylor company [1897]). Originally published in the Photographic Times, 1896. Recap 4597.114.2
Alfred Stieglitz, “Winter-Fifth Avenue,” 1893, carbon print 1894.
The Blizzard, New York. Gelatin silver print, used for the reproduction in Corbin’s article 1905.
Alfred Stieglitz, “Pictorial Photography,” Scribner’s Magazine 26, no.56 (November 1899).
Nine versions are listed in: Sarah Greenough, Alfred Stieglitz: the key set: the Alfred Stieglitz collection of photographs (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art; New York : H.N. Abrams, 2002). Marquand Library Oversize TR653 .N38 2002q.
Note: In-between blowing snow the signs can be read.
Advertisement for Stieglitz’s Picturesque Bits of New York (New York: R.H. Russell, 1897) in Bibelot 3, no. 12 (December 1897). No illustration but price: $25.
Edna Woolman Chase (1877–1957), editor-in-chief of Vogue magazine from 1914 to 1952. Detail from Doris Ulmann’s A Portrait Gallery of American Editors, full page below.
In 1924, when Doris Ulmann (1882-1934) began photographing the leading magazine and newspaper editors in the United States, she made 43 portraits; 41 were men and 2 were women.
Many of the sitters Ulmann met through The Art Center on 56th Street, incorporated in 1921 to bring together seven organizations: Art Alliance of America, Art Director’s Club, American Institute of Graphic Arts, New York Society of Craftsmen, Pictorial Photographers of America, Society of Illustrators, and the Stowaways.
Elmer Adler (1884-1962), founder of Princeton’s Graphic Arts Collection and a member of AIG and the Stowaways, was the original owner of our book.
A student of the Clarence White School, Ulmann published three volumes of portraits printed in photogravure between 1919 and 1925: The Faculty of the College of Physicians & Surgeons, Columbia University in the City of New York: Twenty-Four Portraits (1919), A Book of Portraits of the Faculty of the Medical Department of the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore (1922), and A Portrait Gallery of American Editors (1925).
With each, she collaborated with a small circle of friends from the White School and The Art Center, including the Center’s president, Frederic W. Goudy (1865-1947). Goudy designed and arranged the type for her books and Bertha M. Goudy (1869-1935) set the type at their Village Press, which had recently moved from Queens to Marlborough-on-Hudson. The photogravures were engraved and printed from her negatives by Harry M. Phillips at his Manhattan Photogravure Company, 142 W. 27th Street.
At an Art Center meeting, Goudy introduced the typeface he used:
“Members were gratified and reassured to see our ex-president, F. W. Goudy, at the March 22 meeting, the first public affair he had attended since his operation and convalescence. Many compliments were heard that evening, and since, concerning Mr. Goudy’s new typeface, “Garamont,” a classic interpretation of the face used by Geoffrey Tory’s pupil. In further celebration of Mr. Goudy’s return to health and productivity, the Committee on Publications in April distributed to members, as one of their “keepsakes,” Clarence White’s portrait study of Mr. Goudy, reproduced in gravure by Harry M. Phillips of Manhattan Photogravure Company.”–Bulletin of The Art Center May 1923 [Keepsake: Graphic Arts Collection GAX 2010-0022F].
Note: Each of the sitters was asked to write a short statement about themselves and their work. All except one was published. Why is there no text along with the portrait of Elizabeth Cutting (1871-1946)? Did she not write one or was it considered unacceptable and not printed?
Cutting’s 1947 obituary in New York History notes that she received a B.A. from Vassar College and an M.A. from Columbia University. She joined the editorial staff of Harper’s Bazaar in 1907 before moving to The North American Review in 1910, serving as managing editor from 1921 to 1927. She was among the founders of the Cosmopolitan Club in New York and made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor by the French government. It is too bad her statement, if there was one, does not appear.
Doris Ulmann (1882-1934), A Portrait Gallery of American Editors, Being a Group of XLIII Likenesses by Doris Ulmann; with critical essays by the editors and an introduction by Louis Evan Shipman (New York: W.E. Rudge, 1925). Copy 193 of 375. “The types, designed and arranged by Frederic W. Goudy, have been set by Bertha M. Goudy at the Village Press, Marlborough-on-Hudson, New York. Presswork by William Edwin Rudge, Mt. Vernon, New York.” Graphic Arts Collection GAX Oversize 2006-0205F
See also: Elizabeth Brown Cutting, Old Taverns and Posting Inns (London: G.P. Putnam, 1898).
Adolf Müller (1884-1945), Von der Pike Auf, Zum 60. Geburtstag unseres Chefs herrn Adolf Müller zusammengestellt [Munich: H. Schwaiger, 1944]. Frontispiece portrait and approximately 300 black & white photographs on 104 glossy photo paper. 160 unnumbered leaves of text, all printed on coated glossy paper. Graphic Arts Collection 2018- in process.
The Graphic Arts Collection recently acquired this richly illustrated festschrift for Adolf Müller (1884-1945), the publisher of Mein Kampf and close confidante of Hitler from the earliest days of the Nazi party. Issued to celebrate the publisher’s 60th birthday on May 4, 1944, only two copies were privately printed. Approximately one year later, on May 23, 1945, Müller hanged himself in prison following his capture by American troops.
Müller’s personal copy was bound and presented to him from the firm. This is the copy now at Princeton University Library. The volume contains a first-hand history of the Nazi party’s control of media in the pre-World War II period, as well as documentation of Müller’s publishing empire and his relationship with Hitler. The photographs show printing equipment, offices and factories, intimate shots of Müller’s offices, and reproductions of significant publications.
Quotes below are from the dealer’s well-researched description:
Müller was an intimate friend of Hitler — it was Müller who picked him up from Landsberg prison (documented within) in 1924 and Hitler lived in the publisher’s house in Tegernsee. Müller published Mein Kampf in 1925 and all its subsequent editions. The chief publisher of the Nazi party, he directed the printing of the newspaper “Völkischer Beobachter,” a vital arm of the Nazi propaganda effort.
Müller parlayed his firm’s importance to the Nazi cause from its earliest days into powerful administrative positions and a close friendship with Hitler. Intimate scenes of Müller show him hunting and fishing, participating in Nazi rallies, working at his desk, conferring with prominent Nazi officials, etc. Among the many images of Müller’s personal life, Hitler appears in twelve images, including one where he has just been released from Landsberg prison following the Beer Hall Putsch and stands next to Müller’s car.
After his discharge from the German army in 1915, Müller founded the printing company Münchner Buchgewerbhaus M. Müller & Sohn, to publish newspapers and magazines. By the early 1920s he had formed friendships with members of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and, starting in 1925, Müller’s firm was the party’s central publishing house.
Subsequently, the Nazi party entrusted to Müller the publication of Mein Kampf because of his friendship with Hitler. Once the Nazi party had taken over the German government, Müller’s business, benefitting from a near monopoly, grew exponentially. He officially joined the party at Hitler’s request in 1934. His firm printed more than two million copies weekly of various Nazi magazines and newspapers at the beginning of World War II. Müller’s leadership was an irreplaceable component of the Nazi party’s propaganda apparatus in the 1920s and through to the end of the war.
The text of this book provides a thorough account of Müller’s career, which, at times, is surprisingly candid. Certain portions touch upon the company’s claims that it was an impartial entity, even though it underwent a rapid change from a neutral publishing house into a company wholly involved in National Socialist propaganda.
Additionally, it becomes clear that this document was not intended for widespread publication since it openly discusses the company’s internal operations and political decisions in a very forthright and revealing manner.
Another section describes the firm’s entanglement in a controversy regarding the reporting of Germany’s annexation of Austria. Finally, there are extensive histories of the publication of Mein Kampf and the “Völkischer Beobachter.”
According to the preface composed by Heinrich Schwaiger, chief manager of the Munich headquarters, two copies of the work were printed, however the present copy was the only one bound and the second, which remained in sheets, can no longer be located. Despite Nazi Germany’s growing number of defeats by 1944 and the destruction of the company’s headquarters in a bombing raid, no expense was spared in this book’s production. An original Gothic font was cast especially for this book, and the company’s plant prioritized the high-quality illustrations on fine coated photo paper.
All of the photographs are fully described and the individuals identified. Here is one example of the many indexes through the volume.
After Seneca Ray Stoddard (1844-1917), Statue of Liberty at Night, 1889. Photogravure. Published in Sun and Shade, vol. 3, no. 25 (September 1890).
“Mr. Stoddard employed five cameras on this occasion, stationing them on the Steamboat Pier. A wire was stretched from the torch of the Statue to the mast of a vessel a considerable distance away. Placed on this wire, controlled by a pulley, was a cup containing one and one-half pounds of flash powder; an electric wire was connected with it, and at a given signal the current turned on, by the electrician in charge of the torch, the flash exploded and the exposure made.”
While living in Kilburn Square, Ernest Edwards (1836-1903) recorded his occupation as Heliotyper, having patented his own version of the heliotype or collotype. The Edwards Heliotype Plant employed 72 workers in 1872, making ink prints for such noteworthy projects as Oscar G. Rejlander’s photographs in Darwin’s The Expressions of Emotions in Man and Animals, [Graphic Arts Collection 2003-0902N].
At the age of 36, Edwards left his business to make heliotypes for Osgood and Company in Boston from 1872-1886 but when that firm went bankrupt, Edwards joined Edward L. Wilson (1838-1903) in New York City, where The Philadelphia Photographer was now published as Wilson’s Photographic Magazine. The two men each rented offices at 853 Broadway, off Union Square, and Wilson began highlighting Edwards’s photomechanical prints each month in his magazine.
Thanks to wide-spread acclaim and growing demand in his work, Edwards moved again, taking over the entire building at 137 West 23rd Street for his New York Photo-Gravure Company. To further promote his artistic printing, the company launched a luxury magazine, entitled Sun and Shade, a large format monthly comprised of photogravure and photogelatine (collotype) plates “without letterpress.” Each issue featured several important photographers of the day as well as reproductions of fine art.
“A year ago we commenced the publication of our novel venture in journalism Sun and Shade,” wrote Edwards, “a Picture Periodical without letterpress, almost as an experiment, with a modest list of less than fifty subscribers. To-day we are printing an edition of 4,000 copies monthly. A sufficiently convincing proof of the wisdom of our hope that there was room for us.”
“In our rapid growth, the wish has been indicated unmistakably for the higher grade of pictures, and of the higher class—always for quality rather than quantity. Following rather than leading such a wish, we feel that we make no mistake in marking the future career of the magazine to be rather that of an artistic periodical than a photographic record of events.” —Photographic Times and American Photographer, Vol. 19 (1889): 394.
Reviews of the lavish magazine noted in particular that it offered “pictures without text,” and today, we recognize Sun and Shade as the important forerunner of Camera Notes, Camera Work, and later, Life and Look magazines.
“Sun and Shade is evidently meeting with the popularity it so richly deserves, in as much as it is impossible to secure back numbers, and we are told that the publishers in several cases have been obliged to re-issue in order to meet the great demand for certain numbers. —American Journal of Photography, vol. 10 (1889): 189.
Princeton University Library is fortunately to have an almost complete run of Edwards’s journal, with all the plates intact. Here are a few more examples.
Sun & Shade: an Artistic Periodical (New York: New York Photo-gravure Co., 1888/89-1896). 8 v. SA Oversize N1 .S957q.
Portfolio of eight pochoir prints from Revillon Frères (Revillon Brothers), 1929-1930. Graphic Arts Collection GAX Oversize 2003-0052F
Portfolio of four pochoir prints from Revillon Frères (Revillon Brothers), 1927-1928. Graphic Arts Collection GAX Oversize 2003-0051F
Portfolio of six photogravure prints from Revillon Frères (Revillon Brothers), ca. 1923-1924. Graphic Arts Collection GAX Oversize 2007-0027E.
The French fur company, Revillon Frères, promoted their firm with annual portfolios of fine art prints. Many featured pochoir fashion plates but in the early 1920s, the company prepared a series of six photogravures from photographs by Robert J. Flaherty (1884-1951). Revillon Frères owned the copyright to all Flaherty’s work, having sponsored the Canadian expedition that resulted in the film Nanook of the North (1922). A total of eighteen photogravures were printed, from which six were chosen for the annual portfolio (ca. 1923-1924). The remaining twelve photogravures could be purchased from G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York.
In 1925, the Revillon company wrote to V. Lansing Collins, reference librarian, preceptor, and Secretary of Princeton University, about the possible sale of their merchandise in Princeton. The following month, the company began advertising in the Daily Princetonian and as a thank you for Collins’s assistance, sent the Princeton University Library their untitled portfolio of six Flaherty prints.
In 1945, a second, also untitled portfolio with all 18 photogravures was donated to the Library in memory of Martin V. Bergen, Jr., Princeton Class of 1892 [Ex Oversize 2007-0026E].
[below] Advertisement. Daily Princetonian, 46, Number 109 (24 October 1925)
“In New York Flaherty had become friendly with a Thierry Mallet, a senior officer of Revillon Frères, a French fur trading company that was the main competitor in Canada of the Hudson’s Bay Company. Mallet was in the audience at a private screening of Flaherty’s surviving Baffin Island print sometime in early 1920 and it gave him an idea.
. . . Mallet persuaded the directors of Revillon Frères to sponsor Flaherty’s return to the north to make another film featuring the company for showing in their anniversary year.
. . . For twelve months, from August 1920 to August 1921, he based himself at the Revillon Frères post at Port Harrison, now Inukjuak, on the eastern shore of Hudson Bay, a little south of Cape Dufferin.” — Jeremy Murray-Brown, “Robert Flaherty: the Old Longing” (Boston University)
Robert Joseph Flaherty (1884-1951), [Robert Flaherty photogravures] (New York: Revillon Frères, [ca. 1925]. Gift of the publisher. Graphic Arts Collection Oversize 2007-0027E.
Includes printed text: “The six copper-plate engravings contained herein are reproductions of photographs of the inhabitants of the sub-arctic part of Eastern Canada. These six photographs, chosen from a collection of eighteen, were made during a series of five expeditions covering a period of eleven years. They were taken on behalf of our company by Robert J. Flaherty, F.R.G.S., around Cape Dufferin and Belcher Islands on the Northeast coast of Hudson Bay, in the Peninsula of Ungava, in the Hudson Strait, and on the coast of Baffin Land.”
The complete set of 18 photogravures: Allegoo (Shining Water) Sikoslingmuit Eskimo Woman, Southern Baffin Land — Nascaupie Indian Chief, Northern Labrador — Cunayou (The Sculpin) Sikoslingmuit Eskimo Girl, Southern Baffin Land — Tooktoo (The Deer) Chief of Sikoslingmuit Eskimos, Southern Baffin Land — SAPA, Sikoslingmuit Eskimo of Southern Baffin Land — A Labrador Cree (Indian), Northern Labrador — The Harpooner — Youthful Hunter — The Hunter, Eskimo in the rough ice-fields at sea — Summer (August), Eskimo Kayak in Northeastern Hudson Bay — Nyla and child, Eteeveemuit Eskimo of Cape Dufferin, Northwest Ungava — The Huskie (The Wolf Dog of the Eskimos) — Eskimo Omiak in the Spring — The Barren Lands, Northern Ungava — The Gramophone — Abandoned Eskimo Village, Ungava Coast of Hudson Bay — The Walrus Hunter — Eskimo Fisherman in his Kayak.
See also: Revillon Frères, Igloo life; a brief account of a primitive Arctic tribe living near one of the most northern trading posts of Revillon Frères (New York: Privately printed, 1923). ReCAP 998 R326
Claude-Félix-Abel Niépce de Saint-Victor (1805-1870), Traité pratique de gravure héliographique sur acier et sur verre / par M. Niépce de Saint-Victor (Paris: Librairie de V. Masson, 1856). Provenance: C. F. Chandler. Graphic Arts Collection 2006-3213N
