Souvenir of Eminent Poets and American Authors Series I & II.

[ALCOTT, Louisa May; Ralph Waldo Emerson; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; Harriet Beecher Stowe].

$1,500.00

Item Number: 134524

Rare collection of albumen silver print portraits of eminent 19th century poets and American authors. Octavo, three volumes, original pictorial covers, bound with the original ribbons. Including the portraits of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Alfred Lord Tennyson, George William Curtis, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louisa May Alcott, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. In very good condition. Rare and unique.

The albumen print, also called albumen silver print, was published in January 1847 by Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard, and was the first commercially exploitable method of producing a photographic print on a paper base from a negative. It used the albumen found in egg whites to bind the photographic chemicals to the paper and became the dominant form of photographic positives from 1855 to the start of the 20th century, with a peak in the 1860-90 period.