james nasmyth
Back of Hand & Shrivelled Apple. To Illustrate
the Origin of Certain Mountain Ranges
By Shrinkage of the Globe

Woodburytype
Plate II from The Moon: Considered as A Planet, A World, and a Satellite 1874
Photographer’s credit and title printed on mount
Images: 13 cm x 9.5 cm

Estimate: $2,000

James Nasmyth (b. 1808) was a Scottish engineer and inventor, and an instrumental figure in the early development of steam-powered machine tools of modern industry. Nasmyth’s contribution to the history of early photography in itself is notable. An amateur astronomer, he built refracting telescopes to observe the moon--drawing, photographing and notating its surface in incredible detail. Using these notes, together with James Carpenter, an astronomer at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, they constructed large-scale plaster models of the lunar surface then carefully lit and photographed them. The resulting photographs of these moon reconstructions were eventually published in 1874 in The Moon: Considered a Planet, a World, and a Satellite, one of the most beguiling photobooks of the 19th century for its curious amalgam of pedagogical simulation, theatricality, and debatable scientific study. Their stated aim was to educate the eye with a close examination of the moon to understand its true nature. In their desire to demonstrate the widely held theory that the moon was still volcanically active, they made their famous photographic analogy comparing the contrasting effect of the rapidly cooling lunar surface with a wrinkled hand and shriveled apple. It is also significant as one of the first books to be illustrated by the Woodburytype photo-mechanical process. Developed in 1864 and used until 1900, it proved to be the only commercial printing method that successfully replicated the details of a photograph. Without the interference of a screen, woodburytypes produce true middle values.