The Art-Union, Monthly Journal of the Fine Arts and the Arts, Decorative, Ornamental. Volume the Eighth [Original Calotype Included]

London: Palmer and Clayton, 1846. Very Good. London: Palmer and Clayton, 1846. First Edition. Quarto (30cm.); modern calf over contemporary marbled boards, contemporary gilt spine labels retained; 338,[2](ads)pp.; seventeen leaves of plates, including two printed in color and two folding, as well as the captioned and mounted original calotype (85.x6.5cm.) facing p. 143 depicting "The Martyr's Monument, Oxford," with printed patent mounted to recto of leaf. Margins of paper over boards scuffed, intermittent heavy foxing throughout textblock occasionally affecting plates, vertical crease affecting nearly every leaf, including calotype, else a Very Good, sound volume.

The most important volume of The Art-Union, featuring an exceptionally early calotype. Just two years earlier, in 1844, the inventor William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) had begun work on his first photo-illustrated book, The Pencil of Nature, using his salted paper process resulting in a calotype (frequently called a "talbotype" by the inventor's friends). The next year he approached The Art-Union editor Samuel Carter Hall, securing a deal to include a calotype in every copy of the periodical's eighth volume. However, printing 6,000 calotypes proved an enormously difficult task for which Talbot and his printer Nicolaas Henneman were not prepared: "The paper was not properly exposed, not well fixed or washed, and badly pasted onto the magazine leaves. The images faded almost as soon as they were created and the publicity Talbot received was all negative" (Julie L. Mellby, "A Talbotype Illustration for the Art- Union").

However, the calotype could be nothing short of revolutionary and the text for the accompanying article, "The Talbotype - Sun Pictures," provides a glimpse of the reaction of a contemporary laying their eyes on a photograph for the first time: "On their first appearance, artists who were not as yet cognizant of the discovery were at a loss to pronounce upon them--they could, at once, understand that they were charactered [sic] by nothing like human handling; there was no resemblance to touch, for the eye to rest upon--they resembled nothing that had ever been done."

This example of special note for featuring a calotype also used in one of The Pencil of Nature fascicles the previous year.