The thick and heavy photo albums lay among the even weightier Victorian family Bibles. Many of the Bibles and albums were in dark tones of browns and blacks tempered with gold leaf, except for two. One was wrapped in red crushed felt and the other in a soft pastel green cloth with silver-plated floral corners and gold-tone hinge.
I opened the green album but didn’t expect to find any photographs in it. I knew that if the family had left any, the auction house had surely removed them for sale separately to fetch more dollars.
I was right. There were no photos, but the title page was intriguing: “Album of American Scenery.” Was it a photo album or a picture book?
Flipping open the next page, I found that it was both. There were circular and rectangular domed cutouts for photographs – likely cabinet cards since the album appeared to be from the 19th century. Most of the pages held illustrations in sepia of nature scenes from around the country.
There were drawings of such sites as Niagara Falls, the Hudson River in New York, the Delaware Water Gap in Pennsylvania, Yosemite forest, Harpers Ferry and coastal Florida.
I wasn’t sure who manufactured the album, but I found by Googling that the major supplier of “this class of handsome books” was a company called Edward Posen & Co., with offices in Germany and New York. The album was likely produced in the 1880s or 1890s, based on what I found on the web, and could have been manufactured by that company.
An article in the American Stationers trade publication in 1890 noted that Posen was the first to make these types of albums, as early as 1888, as part of a series called “American Scenery.” Here’s one of its albums with photos.
Posen’s album consisted of 12 chromo lithographic illustrations of the country’s most popular attractions, including “Niagara Falls, Yosemite Valley, entrance through the Golden Gate, with the seal rocks, the Rocky Mountains, the Capitol at Washington, &c.” The company knew the albums were popular, the article stated, because other manufacturers had copied it – sometimes even using Posen’s designs.
These albums came out at a time when some people were traveling on vacations to see what the rest of the country looked like. Niagara Falls had become one of the most popular destinations.
Earlier in the century, artists had ventured away from home to capture nature on canvas and in articles. By the mid-1800s, the New York publishing firm D. Appleton & Co. was manufacturing books for the burgeoning tourist trade. It produced a set titled “Picturesque America” from 1872-1874. These were not photo albums, but drawings of “American life, scenery and places” by named illustrators of the day.
One book noted that some artists and writers through their emphasis on nature were attempting to move the young country to the level of its European big brothers, arguing that the “dramatic natural scenery compensated for America’s lack of history” and through its beauty was destined for greatness by God.
Here is a sampling of pages from the photo album at auction:
