Anna Atkins Biography and Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions by Lisa Shea

Author:Lisa Shea [Shea, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2015-12-24T05:00:00+00:00

ABOUT THE ALGAE BOOK

As you might imagine, there wasn’t an enormous audience clamoring to get their hands on a book about algae. It wasn’t as if Anna had written Pride & Prejudice. So she only did a limited run of her printings. She created small 13-image booklets which each covered a small subset of her algae library. Over time she got better samples so she’d re-release booklets or individual plates and deliver them to book owners.

Some book owners would replace the booklets in their library. Others wouldn’t, for whatever reason. Over the years books got lost or destroyed. In our current time, only seventeen copies of the books are accounted for – and they’re all in different configurations. So it’s not like Pride & Prejudice where a book came out in one format and pretty much is always found like that.

The books, having been printed back in the mid-1800s, are long out of copyright. The images in here hail from the copy held at the New York Public Library. The images are from Booklets I through XII. They got the book directly from Herschel’s descendants.

Booklets I through XII were published between 1843 and 1850. So this was not a quick process, even though they held only 13 or so images each. Note that they were missing booklet III.

Even though Anna had access to typesetting, she chose not to use it. Instead, she did even the text with cyanotype. All she had to do was hand-write notes on thin see-through paper and then lay that paper on top of a cyanotype paper. Voila! The sun would shine through the thin parts and the darker ink would leave its shadow.

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