Steidlville

Imagining Paradise is the first book to showcase the treasures from the Richard and Ronay Menschel Library at George Eastman House. Over two hundred and fifty rare books from this remarkable collection, each beautifully illustrated and accompanied by commentary written by prominent scholars, reflect the unparalleled strength and depth of the library’s collection.

Both sumptuous and informative, Imagining Paradise is a large, handsome volume, as befits its wide range of subjects, photographers, and photographic processes: from bucolic landscapes, travel and exploration, science and medicine to the literary and the illustrious; from the incunabula of William Henry Fox Talbot, the reveries of Maxime Du Camp and Francis Frith, the vision of Peter Henry Emerson to the turn of the century international movement of art photography, Camera Work and 291 of Alfred Stieglitz and the exceptional published and unpublished books by Alvin Langdon Coburn. Including books illustrated with tipped-in original salt prints, albumen prints, platinum prints, photogravures, carbon prints, collotypes, and Woodburytypes.

The book presents many different versions and translations in five different languages of Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre’s seminal instructional manual describing the daguerreotype process, and a selection from the comprehensive collection of instructional literature: landmark manuals and technical literature published in the first fifty years of photography as well as journals for both the amateur and the professional.

The book features works of great consequence such as the Copy of the Treaty between Great Britain and China, signed at Nanking August 29, 1842. The Chinese text copied by the photographic process licensed by Talbot to W. Henry Collen is the only photographic copy known of the treaty that ended the First Opium War and ceded Hong Kong. It also features works of great beauty such as, The Holy Bible, a two-volume edition dating from 1862-1863, bound in rich red morocco leather, with gold letterpress, finished with bronze clasps, and illustrated with a total of fifty-six photographs by Francis Frith.

Co-published with George Eastman House, Rochester.