Robert Hunt, A Manual of Photography, 1841

I would like to ask for the following textbook with regard to a research project: Robert Hunt, A Manual of photography, first edition, 1841. As far as I know, it is not available in any library. Does anyone know where a copy is?  Is it in an english or american library or does anyone have a copy?
Thanks for help and advise.

Kind regards,
Nadja Lenz

 

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  • Dear James,

    Congratulations on your fellowship - serious work on Hunt is long overdue. As to bits and bobs, come visit Rock House, for a lot of this will be buried in my now-ancient Herschel files.  Sir John, who really gave Hunt his introduction to the scientific world and was generally fairly forgiving of people changed his attitude towards Hunt going into the 1850s.

    Hunt was a part of the opposition to Talbot's patent and Talbot was unimpressed with his lack of fairness - see http://foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk/letters/transcriptDocnum.php?docnum=6976 and passim. I strongly believe that Hunt was the author of the diatribes against Talbot during this period and I've never quite understood his animus.  Perhaps you can ferret this out.

    Do let me know if I can be of any specific assistance.

    happy hunting,

    Larry


     James Ryan said:

    Dear Professor Schaaf

    I've only just come across this discussion and would be very pleased if you might share your other bits of information about Robert Hunt. I've recently begun research on Robert Hunt, for a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship this academic year. I'm researching Hunt's varied activities and popular science writings, particularly in relation to his links to Cornwall and Devon. I'm especially interested in his work on photography. I've read his correspondence with Talbot (via the online archives) but didn't find any sign there that he turned on Talbot. I've yet to read his correspondence with Herschel at the Royal Society as I think there are better hints there of Hunt's character.

    best wishes

    James



    Larry J Schaaf said:

    Hunt's original manual, as Giles suggests, was his Popular Treatise on the Art of Photography, including Daguerréotype, and All the New Methods of Producing Pictures by the Chemical Agency of Light (Glasgow: Richard Griffin & Co., 1841).  It was published both as a standalone book and also as a part of Griffin's Scientific Miscellany - the text is the same in both.   It grew out of Hunt's observations at the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Glasgow in 1840.  While your chances of finding an original are slim, there was a quirky but very useful annotated facsimile done by James Yinpeh Tong (Ohio University Press, 1973), and copies of this are still around.  You'll find his notes useful from a chemical point of view, although there is very little biographical or humanistic annotated (which is where the real story lies).  Hunt is particularly fascinating because he experimented with all the processes that he wrote about - and invented others.  Each subsequent edition, along with his Researches on Light and other related titles, reveals new layers of understanding about how photography worked.  The young and poor Robert Hunt got great encouragement in the early years of photography from Sir John Herschel, who introduced him to WHF Talbot, and for a while all was good.  However, in the 1850s, Hunt turned on both Herschel and Talbot, for reasons that are not entirely clear, and hopefully not as simple as him progressing up through the scientific tiers and gaining in hat size.  I've got one or two bits of information in my files, if you have specific questions.   Enjoy, Larry 

  • Dear Professor Schaaf

    I've only just come across this discussion and would be very pleased if you might share your other bits of information about Robert Hunt. I've recently begun research on Robert Hunt, for a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship this academic year. I'm researching Hunt's varied activities and popular science writings, particularly in relation to his links to Cornwall and Devon. I'm especially interested in his work on photography. I've read his correspondence with Talbot (via the online archives) but didn't find any sign there that he turned on Talbot. I've yet to read his correspondence with Herschel at the Royal Society as I think there are better hints there of Hunt's character.

    best wishes

    James



    Larry J Schaaf said:

    Hunt's original manual, as Giles suggests, was his Popular Treatise on the Art of Photography, including Daguerréotype, and All the New Methods of Producing Pictures by the Chemical Agency of Light (Glasgow: Richard Griffin & Co., 1841).  It was published both as a standalone book and also as a part of Griffin's Scientific Miscellany - the text is the same in both.   It grew out of Hunt's observations at the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Glasgow in 1840.  While your chances of finding an original are slim, there was a quirky but very useful annotated facsimile done by James Yinpeh Tong (Ohio University Press, 1973), and copies of this are still around.  You'll find his notes useful from a chemical point of view, although there is very little biographical or humanistic annotated (which is where the real story lies).  Hunt is particularly fascinating because he experimented with all the processes that he wrote about - and invented others.  Each subsequent edition, along with his Researches on Light and other related titles, reveals new layers of understanding about how photography worked.  The young and poor Robert Hunt got great encouragement in the early years of photography from Sir John Herschel, who introduced him to WHF Talbot, and for a while all was good.  However, in the 1850s, Hunt turned on both Herschel and Talbot, for reasons that are not entirely clear, and hopefully not as simple as him progressing up through the scientific tiers and gaining in hat size.  I've got one or two bits of information in my files, if you have specific questions.   Enjoy, Larry 

  • Dear all! Thank you very much for your help and advise. Hunts first manual is to be find online in the ETH Zürich library (http://www.e-rara.ch/zut/content/structure/34314?lang=de) and thanks to Rolf H. Krauss as real book in a German archive in Stuttgart. Thank you so much. I really enjoy this forum! Regards from germany.

  • Hunt's original manual, as Giles suggests, was his Popular Treatise on the Art of Photography, including Daguerréotype, and All the New Methods of Producing Pictures by the Chemical Agency of Light (Glasgow: Richard Griffin & Co., 1841).  It was published both as a standalone book and also as a part of Griffin's Scientific Miscellany - the text is the same in both.   It grew out of Hunt's observations at the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Glasgow in 1840.  While your chances of finding an original are slim, there was a quirky but very useful annotated facsimile done by James Yinpeh Tong (Ohio University Press, 1973), and copies of this are still around.  You'll find his notes useful from a chemical point of view, although there is very little biographical or humanistic annotated (which is where the real story lies).  Hunt is particularly fascinating because he experimented with all the processes that he wrote about - and invented others.  Each subsequent edition, along with his Researches on Light and other related titles, reveals new layers of understanding about how photography worked.  The young and poor Robert Hunt got great encouragement in the early years of photography from Sir John Herschel, who introduced him to WHF Talbot, and for a while all was good.  However, in the 1850s, Hunt turned on both Herschel and Talbot, for reasons that are not entirely clear, and hopefully not as simple as him progressing up through the scientific tiers and gaining in hat size.  I've got one or two bits of information in my files, if you have specific questions.   Enjoy, Larry 

  • A Manual of Photography, 4th edition, 1854, is available in the Internet Archive (www.archive.org), along with numerous other works by Hunt:

    http://archive.org/details/amanualphotogra00huntgoog

  • Dear Nadja,

    The full title of the first edition is: A Popular Treatise on the Art of Photography , Including Daguerreotype, And All the New Methods of Producing Pictures By the Agency of Light.

    There is a copy of this in the Getty Museum library.

    Kind regards,

    Noel Chanan

  • Thank you very much!!!

  • Is not the first edition of Hunt's A Manual of Photography effectively his A Popular Treatise on the Art of Photography? i.e. there is no such work, other then this, which he refers to in the preface of Photography: A Treatise on the Chemical Changes Produced by the Solar Radiation (this latter being de facto the second edition of the same work)? That is, he changed the titles and much of the text between what he regarded as the first, second and third editions of the same work?

    Regards

    Giles Hudson

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