DAGUERREOTYPES AND BOOK SLEUTHING - An NEDCC Story

Nineteenth century rare books, daguerreotypes, and twenty-first century digital imaging technology converge to help us glimpse the lives of people in the 1840-50's…

Todd Pattison remembers the first time a daguerreotype really caught his eye. “A friend who collects nineteenth century photographs alerted me to a daguerreotype he had seen for sale. There was a young boy in the image holding a book with a striped binding, which I recognized as a particular type of printed pattern cloth used as a binding material for only a few years in the late 1840’s. These bindings are quite rare now and I was surprised that you could make out the details of the cloth pattern in the photograph.”

Pattison, Senior Book Conservator at the Northeast Document Conservation Center, is also a passionate book collector with a particular interest in mid-19th century cloth publisher's bindings. Over the past ten years, he has begun to collect daguerreotypes that feature books in personal portraits. . .

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NORTHEAST DOCUMENT CONSERVATION CENTER
Andover, MA
Preserving Cultural Heritage Collections Since 1973