010095.de.56

Imprint: London: Lovell Reeve, 5, Henrietta Street, Covent Garden. 1858.

Octavo, measuring 192 x 140 mm, bound in maroon patterned cloth, with a design of a telescope (based on print 5) in gilt on upper board; xvi, 451, [2], 23, [1], 15, [5]p., map; with 20 stereoscopic double views by Smyth relating to his narrative, mounted on light card. The photographs accompany and illustrate Smyth's account of his 1856 expedition to make astronomical observations in Tenerife, a result of his experience as an astronomer in the brilliant night skies of South Africa, where he had spent the first ten years of his career (and where he first took up photography). The journey was financed by a £500 Admiralty grant, and the results of the trip were published both in an official Admiralty report and in this more popular account.The work has the added distinction of being the first published book to use original stereoscopic illustrations and marked the beginning of Lovell Reeve's involvement in this form of publishing. This fact, together with the value of photography as a scientific tool, is stressed in Smyth's introductory note on the illustrations (pp. xi-xii): 'Anxious as myself to put all the actual facts of Nature in the elevated regions that were visited, as completely as possible before the public, Mr. Lovell Reeve has been earnestly at work for some time past, and with the gratuitous and continued assistance of Mr. Glaisher of the Greenwich Observatory, has succeeded in maturing plans for illustrating the letter-press with a series of photo-stereographs, the original negatives for which were taken by myself. 'This method of book illustration never having been attempted before, may excuse a word on this part of the subject. By its necessary faithfulness, a photograph of any sort must keep a salutary check on the pencil or long-bow of the traveller; but it is not perfect; it may be tampered with, and may suffer from accidental faults of the material. These, which might sometimes produce a great alteration of meaning in important parts of a view, may, however, be eliminated, when, as here, we have two distinct portraits of each object. Correctness is thus secured; and then if we wish to enjoy the effects either of solidity or of distance, effects which are cynosures of all the great painters, we have only to combine the two photographs stereoscopically, and those bewitching qualities are produced. Stereographs have not hitherto been bound up, as plates, in a volume; yet this will be found a most convenient way of keeping them, not incompatible with the use of the ordinary stereoscope, open below and well adapted for Mr. Reeve's new form of the instrument, - The Book Stereoscope, - constructed by Messrs. Negretti and Zambra, to fold up in a case like a map, without detriment to its stereoscopic action. I have only further to observe, that while Mr. Reeve has been organizing his application of the manufacturing principle to the printing of photographs - Mr. Glaisher has personally superintended the chemical part of the process, in the hands of Mr. Melluish, of Blackheath, in order to ensure permanence in the pictures so multiplied.'