Birmingham Library & Sir Benjamin Stone

[Michael Wong]

The following is an article by Graeme Brown that appeared in the Birmingham Mail which may be of interest to some of you BPH members out there. You can read the rest of it in this link here.

"Sir Benjamin Stone, born 174 years ago, collected and took photographs to create a historical record for generations to come as the world went through drastic changes during the rapid industrialisation of the late 19th century.

His passion took him from festivals in Abbots Bromley and Sutton Coldfield to Australia and China. Sir Benjamin spent more than £1 million in today’s money in a quest to create a vast visual encyclopaedia of the ancient and modern world.

It led him to amass 22,000 photographs, 2,500 lantern slides, 17,000 glass negatives and more than 100 albums and scrapbooks, which will soon be housed at the new Library of Birmingham – and earned him the nickname ‘Sir Snapshot’......... "