We are happy to announce that The Papers of William Henry Fox Talbot are now searchable online in the British Library catalogue.To search the collection, go to the British Library's online catalogue and search for
William Henry Fox Talbot or Add MS 88942 : 1647-1952
(first click on "details" and then on "see contents" on the right).
The Talbot Papers were donated to the British Library by the Talbot family in 2005. A subsequent loan collection of further material came to the British Library from the family in 2008. The collection is significant in both scope and scholarly integrity: The papers contain notebooks, letters, photographs, diaries, unbound Assyriological and mathematical folios, natural specimens in herbaria, offprints of Talbot’s articles, patents, artefacts and a small selection of books from Talbot’s library. Whilst the covering dates of the collection are 1647-1952, most of the material is from Talbot's lifetime. The Talbot collection as a whole is still in the process being catalogued. To date, the first series, Talbot's notebooks Add MS 88942/1, has been completed and is already available to readers. The extent recorded online (348 folders) thus refers to this first Series and will be revised accordingly as the cataloguing project progresses.
The photographs in this collection are catalogued separately in the British Library Catalogue of Photographs.
Talbot's correspondence had already been calendared and transcribed by The Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot Project.
Regarding the wider archive, several photographic notebooks and thousands of important prints (originating in a donation to the Science Museum by Talbot's grand-daughter) are held at the National Media Museum, Bradford and a smaller part of the archive is currently in the process of being acquired by the Bodleian Library or held in several public and private collections. The library of the Talbot family remains partly at the National Trust Property at Lacock Abbey. The archive of the Talbot family and Lacock Abbey is held on deposit at the Wiltshire County Record Office.
Former Identifiers: Deposit 10690
For an overview of the collection, see also
William Henry Fox Talbot: Beyond Photography (Yale University Press 2013)
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