I love art books of all kinds.  They are a great source of inspiration and understanding the history of art, technology, the influences and the impact on social fabric is important to me.

Not only do I acquire new publications as funds permit, I developed a sweet spot for old photography books with first hand descriptions by authors who were developing the art.  Subjects range from history, process and technology and of course, photographic images captured during the early days.

Although most older photography books can be found on-line in a scanned pdf format, nothing beats holding a 150+ year book in hand, smell the paper and turn the pages.

No different when I received the 5th edition of "Traité d’Optique Photographique" by Désiré van Monckhoven, published in 1865.  (First edition, "Traité de photographie sur collodion" was published in 1855 when he was barely 20 years old, later editions were expanded as technology developed.)

Désiré Charles Emanuel van Monckhoven (1834 - 1882), Belgian chemist, was one of the most active researchers in the area of scientific and applied photography in the second half of the 19th century.

In his relatively short life, he invented an enlarger (1864), a dry collodion process (1871), improvements of the carbon print process (1875 - 80), in addition to improving and manufacturing silver-bromide gelatin emulsions.

His publications, translated into many languages, became standard works of photographic technology.  The first english version was translated by W.H. Thornthwaite and published in 1863.

Ghent (Gent, Gand) was his hometown and a street and elementary school are named after him.

Three images are glued on the first few blank pages of the book and I'm not sure if they came with the edition as the online scan at the Getty Museum doesn't show these images in the pdf, pretty sure the original owner glued images from the early days of photography in this book as illustration.

The English translation of 1863 can be found HERE

I believe equally important is his book "Photographic Optics" for all those interested in a first hand description of lenses in the second half of the 19th Century by a scientist, English translation can be found HERE

Enjoy !

Rudi A. Blondia

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