Capturing the Light in 2013

[Michael Wong]

Roger Watson's book about the race between two eccentric characters on either side of the English Channel in the 1830s to develop the world's first photograph has been acquired by the publishers, Pan Macmillan. This non-fiction work features English polymath Henry Fox Talbot and Louis Daguerre in France as they raced to claim the new technology and techniques.

Entitled "Capturing the Light", Pan Macmillan has bought the UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, and plans to publish it in 2013. Non-fiction publisher Jon Butler said, "This is narrative non-fiction at its very best‚ a tale of two lone geniuses racing to be the first to solve an ancient puzzle, in the best tradition of Longitude or Fermat's Last Theorem. And at the very heart of the book, a tiny, ghostly image of a Victorian window, so small and perfect that it 'might be supposed to be the work of some Lilliputian artist': the world's first photographic negative.

Watson is a curator of the Fox Talbot Museum at Lacock Abbey, and the full report can be found here.