not as yet been regarded as a duty incumbent upon a public library, and
has not, accordingly, been provided for out of the public funds. The
same principle has not been applied to it which obtains in the case of
binding, lighting, cleaning, attendance, and other things apart from the
buying of books which are recognised as essential to the efficiency of
such an institution. It follows that photography is so dear as to be
rarely resorted to by private individuals; and that its exercise by
public institutions is impeded not only by considerations of expense,
but also by indispensable but vexatious formalities and restrictions.
Photography, while in private hands, must be costly; first and foremost,
because the photographer must live. Again, if he is an artist of the
accuracy of manipulation required for the work of a public library, he
must be enabled and entitled to put a high value on his services. Again,
he has invested capital both in his education and his working apparatus,
on which he must have interest. Once more, he works by the piece, and
piece labour is always the highest paid. Yet once again, his
remuneration comes to him entirely in money, and not in social position
or distinction. Besides, the demand for the description of photographic
reproduction which a public library would require is as yet but limited,
and partly from these very difficulties of supply. In portraiture, for
which everybody is a customer, and to a less degree in landscape and the
reproduction of works of art, we see that competition has brought the
desired article within reach of the masses. But in photographing books
and MSS. the cost is still very disproportionate to the amount of labour
or the value of material. We move in a vicious circle, the difficulty
of supply restricts demand, and the feebleness of demand obstructs
supply. Nor, were the demand more extensive, would the public be
effectually served by national institutions, so long as the system of
private photography and piece-work endured: for the artist must have his
profit, put it how you will: and it is this simple, and in the present
state of things, legitimate condition, which cripples the library and
museum on this side of their activity; and, while enriching the
individual, impoverishes the State in its spiritual aspect, by impeding
the free circulation of intellectual wealth.
If the cause is as simple as I have stated, the remedy, fortunately, is
no less so. In so far as photography for public objects is concerned, we
must suppress the photographer as a tradesman. The State must enlist
him, pay him a fixed salary, requiring his whole time in return, and
minimise this source of expense by allowing him the rank of a civil
servant, and a status on a par with that of any other head of a
department. It must also provide the assistance which would be
requisite, and the necessary apparatus and chemicals. The photographer's
time being thus paid for, his profit abolished, and the material
provided for him, what source of expense remains? Absolutely none, until
there is a tax upon sunshine.
It may still be fairly inquired:—
1. Whether such an undertaking is within the legitimate sphere of
Government?
2. Whether it is of sufficient public utility to justify Government
action?
3. How far such action would be remunerative financially?
On the first point I shall say hardly anything. I can conceive no
greater objection in principle to an official photographer than to an
astronomer-royal, and I do not expect to hear any objections to the
latter functionary in the city of Sir William Rowan Hamilton and Dr.
Ball.
Nor do I apprehend that many among us will require to be convinced of
the advantage of photography as an auxiliary to library work. It has
already been sufficiently impressed upon us by our friend Mr. Henry
Stevens. We meet here, however, in the hope that our voice on this and
other subjects will penetrate beyond our own circle, and arrest the
attention of many to whom these topics are at present unfamiliar. It is,
further, by proving the utility of photography as an auxiliary to
libraries and museums, and the extent to which these institutions are
trammelled by the present impediments to its exercise, that I shall best
encounter the more difficult question of the financial advantage of the
proposal. For we shall all agree that the more generally useful anything
may be, the more likely it is to be profitable.
I shall therefore point out very briefly the great benefit which the
British Museum, the institution with which I am best acquainted, might
derive from incorporating photography as an organised part of its
system, instead of taking the photographer up to lay him down again. I
shall next adduce several instances within my own knowledge in which
cheap photography would have been of material benefit to individual
frequenters of the Museum; sufficient, it seems to me, to justify the
conclusion that a public need exists, to supply which might be
profitable even in a pecuniary sense. Lastly, I shall look beyond the
needs of any individual library, or any particular class of customers,
and endeavour to point out ways in which a national photographic
institution, preferably, I think, placed in connection with the British
Museum, might subserve public objects of paramount importance.
I have said that, to be adopted to any purpose by a public institution,
photography must become a portion of the organism of the institution
itself. That is, the institution must be the photographer's employer,
not his customer. If otherwise, all sorts of needful but troublesome
official formalities must exist, which combine with the obstacle of
expense to reduce photographic enterprise to a minimum. If a complicated
piece of official machinery has to be set in motion every time a
photograph is wanted, whether by a public department or a private
individual, the want is not likely to be often acknowledged, much less
when a moderate outlay will soon bring both to the end of their tether.
Abolish the relations of tradesman and customer, pay the photographer
once for all by an adequate salary, provide apparatus and chemicals with
sufficient liberality, and you at once cut off whatever has hitherto
hindered and arrested the enlistment of the art in the service of
culture. Instead of an artist working now and then as he may happen to
get an order, which he seldom does except in absolutely urgent cases,
you have one bound to devote the whole of his time to earning a moderate
fixed salary, and, if he is the right sort of man, making it his pride
and pleasure to do so. Instead of an institution doing comparatively
little work, and supported by the reluctant contributions of
comparatively few customers, you have one supported on a large scale at
a cost individually imperceptible. Instead of heads of departments
considering how little they can manage to spend, you will have them
encouraged to tax their new auxiliary's resources to the utmost by the
consideration that, the prime elements of expense being eliminated, it
will, in fact, hardly be possible to spend anything. Here I may be met
by an objection which deserves a reply. "Granting," it may be said, "the
propriety of employing the photographer for strictly national purposes,
why tax the entire community, however lightly, for the benefit of the
small portion of it which may happen to want photographs? Is it right to
take a farthing out of Brown's pocket to save Jones five guineas?" I
scarcely expect that any among us will raise that objection, because,
pursued to its logical consequences, it would abolish every museum and
library supported out of rates or taxes. But, to anticipate it in the
quarters where it may be urged, I shall prove that the benefits of cheap
photography, applied to artistic and literary purposes, extend far
beyond the actual purchasers of photographs, inasmuch as the present
restrictions act injuriously and indeed prohibitively upon undertakings
of admitted general utility, both public and private.
In illustration of the impediments which the present system opposes to
such undertakings, I may instance the difficulty of meeting the
legitimate demands of provincial museums. Residents in the provinces,
equally with residents in the metropolis, contribute to the support of
institutions like the British Museum, and are entitled to expect that
they should, as far as possible, participate in its advantages. There
are, I believe, many well-meaning people so impressed with the justice
of this demand that to give it satisfaction they are prepared to
permanently dislocate the national collection, or to despatch portion
after portion on an itinerating tour throughout the provinces. I need
not seek to convince you that this specious suggestion is unsound; that
the moral and historical and artistic significance of the collection
depend upon its universality and the preservation of the delicate links
and gradations of its several parts, and that the loss of the metropolis
would by no means be the gain of the provinces. It is nevertheless the
duty of the central institution to compensate the provinces in every
possible way for their inevitable disadvantages, and though photography
will not do everything in this respect, it will do much. In sculpture,
coins, engravings, and drawings in outline or of neutral tint, the
smallest town in the kingdom might be almost on a par with the
metropolis for every purpose of instruction or refinement. By enabling
them to be so we should not be creating a luxury, but redressing a
grievance. On this ground alone Government might fairly be asked to move
in the matter. How much, too, might be effected by such artistic and
archæological handbooks, photographically illustrated, as could be
produced for a trifle if the process were no element in the expense! How
much can be and is done even under existing difficulties is shown by the
exquisite autotype illustrations of some of the catalogues of selected
coins and medals recently published by the Numismatic Department of the
British Museum. They prove how easily the entire collection might be
made available for study and inspection all over the kingdom—ay, and in
foreign countries and colonies—and confirm the proposition I have
advanced, that the expenditure of public money in cheapening
photographic reproduction is not merely a boon to the purchaser, but to
the general public.
The circulation of photographs of works of art, though important to
individual collectors, is rather the affair of public institutions. The
similar circulation of books and MSS., the aspect of the question with
which we as librarians are particularly concerned, is more directly
interesting to private individuals, and on this account has attracted
comparatively little notice. I am not sure, however, that it is not the
more important of the two, nor that it may not, after all, be the branch
most susceptible of profitable development. In the matter of rare
books, demand has now almost killed supply. The wish to possess them is
more general than ever, but the means of gratifying it become from day
to day more restricted by the tendency of such books to drift into
public libraries, or into large private collections where they may be
locked up indefinitely, and especially by the competition of America. At
this juncture, photography, particularly in its form of
photo-zincography, steps in, and offers the means of doing for the
amateur of ancient and curious literature, for maps and MSS., precisely
what the printing-press does for the great body of readers. All we need
is that the obstacles which still render this process expensive, except
when applied to objects in great demand, should be removed, that the
scholar should be enabled to procure a cheap photographic reproduction
as easily as the general reader can obtain a cheap book. Such scholars
are numerous enough, I feel convinced, to defray the cost of material
and of minor assistance, leaving in the worst case nothing for the State
to pay but the insignificant salary of the chief photographic officer.
Now let us take the case of another class of students, who deserve even
more consideration, the collators of MSS. and rare books. Why should the
scholar of the nineteenth century be in no better position than the
scholar of the sixteenth? Why should he continue to be exposed to
hardships which science has met? Think of the waste of human effort, the
fret and friction of human temper entailed by the inability to procure
accurate facsimiles. Why should the scholar of an age of light get no
good from the sun? Think of the long journeys, the long residences, the
interminable correspondences of scholars, the mechanical labour if they
are their own copyists, the expense and probable inaccuracy if they are
not. Do we often see a critical edition of a classic without a lament
that the editor has been unable to inspect some MS. at Madrid or Moscow?
Did not the Biblical world wait thirty years for a facsimile of the
Vatican MS., which a photographer would have produced in a small
fraction of the time? And did it not prove an imperfect facsimile after
all? Did not the learned Meibomius, albeit a ponderous Dutchman, ill
adapted for equitation, ride all the way from Leyden to Bologna, allured
by the unhappily misleading announcement, _Habemus Petronium integrum_?
To come nearer to our own times, I may report (since I rather suspect it
has been the germ of the whole subject in my mind) a conversation I have
myself had with the Rev. Dr. Hayman, then editing the Odyssey, and most
anxious to take our Museum MSS. of the poem home to his rectory in the
north of Lancashire. I told him that the idea was contrary to the Museum
statutes, to Act of Parliament, and to the eternal fitness of things. He
said that he would give security to any amount. I said that money would
not compensate the Museum or the world of letters for the loss of an
unique MS., and that it would be shocking to place a scholar, possibly
poor, under obligations which might involve the loss of all he was
worth. "Oh, as to that," he said, "as soon as I got the MS. home I
should insure it for its full value." "Yes," I replied, "and deprive us
of the only security we had for your vigilance." But I think we could
have trusted Dr. Hayman with a photograph, or he could probably have
bought one for the cost of his railway fare to and from London.
Let me now adduce some minor instances of the inconvenience created, at
the Museum alone, by the absence of photographic facilities. The
Congress of Orientalists has felt the want of Oriental MSS. deposited in
England so keenly as to have unanimously concurred in a perfectly futile
memorial to allow them to be sent to the Continent. The Austrian
Government lately addressed an official request for the loan of an
exceedingly rare book, which, if the Museum had possessed it, they could
not have had, but of which, if an official photographic department had
existed, they might have obtained the facsimile for a trifle. With due
photographic facilities at Basle we might each of us have taken home a
perfect facsimile of the memorable letter of Fichet which Mr. Bullen has
brought to our notice, the accurate typographic reproduction of which
will assuredly tax the resources of the printers of the "Library
Chronicle." The Dean of Armagh could tell us how much he had recently to
pay for the transcription of an entire book on Irish history at the
Museum, though the charge was as low as possible. I have seen an
accomplished lady, the wife of a Professor of Fine Art, toiling day
after day for weeks together, laboriously tracing plans of architectural
structures for the illustration of her husband's lectures, which plans,
under the conditions contemplated, she could have carried away in
facsimile for a few shillings. I have known weeks employed and twenty
pounds expended in copying a manuscript grammar of an African language;
and a rare old English book transcribed, every word of it, to obtain a
reprint. I have now a colleague in the Museum coming early and staying
late out of his official time to transcribe an almost illegible Coptic
manuscript, a photograph of which would have answered every purpose.
Another colleague wished to give a facsimile page of a very curious MS.
he had edited for a learned society; but was prevented by the cost;
conversely, the same gentleman, thanks to photography, is at present
deciphering a most obstinate MS. for the Corporation of
Stratford-on-Avon, without having to go there or make himself
responsible for the safe custody of the document. I know that the
charges of the skilful men who restore missing passages of books in
facsimile are, inevitably I suppose, so high that nobody who can help it
will employ them. I have a mutilated book on my table at this moment
which I earnestly wish could be entrusted to one of them, but I fear it
will not do. Now, when we consider that it has been found practicable to
facsimile the rare original edition of "Goody Two Shoes," with numerous
woodcuts, by photo-zincography, and publish it at half-a-crown, it is
clear that there must be something wrong about this exorbitant cost
which so effectually hinders the very work which photography, in our
age, seems so especially called upon to perform, of counteracting the
inevitable tendency of old books to scarcity and consequent dearness. Of
the numerous official services which photography could render in a
library, such as saving time in copying documents, or restoring damaged
leaves of catalogues, I say nothing, for fear of occupying your time
unduly; and of the innumerable uses to which it can be turned by an
ingenious bibliographer I am also silent for the same reason, and
because I regard this branch of the case as the especial property of Mr.
Henry Stevens, who has proved it experimentally, and who has, I hope,
more to tell us respecting it. I will merely remark that under all
disadvantages, the last four volumes of the British Museum Catalogue of
Greek Coins contain 116 autotype plates, with representations of nearly
2000 coins. What might not be done if the Museum were its own
autotypist!
Instances so numerous, representative without doubt of a very large
number which have not come to my knowledge, encourage the hope that the
establishment of a photographic department at the Museum would be even
financially successful. One very strong fact may be adduced, that
proposals have been actually made to obtain a photographic copy of the
great Chinese Cyclopædia, occupying eighteen hundred volumes. The
proposition, needless if the Museum had possessed a photographic
establishment of its own, was that the parties should take the
Cyclopædia away and photograph it themselves. It could not be granted,
although the sum offered was no less than five hundred pounds, which
would have about paid the proposed photographic officer's salary for a
whole year. The fact is conclusive both of the need of photography as an
auxiliary to library work, and of the encouragement which a well-managed
endeavour would be sure to meet. Like the penny post and the telegraph,
once fairly launched, it would raise the wind for itself. "Work," says
George Eliot, "breeds:" and the great initial difficulty removed,
unsuspected developments and applications are sure to be thought of.
Much prudence and judgment would be requisite in working the scheme.
Competition with professional photographers must be avoided; and the
work of the institution confined to reproducing objects in its own
collections, or those of other public institutions, or such in private
hands as possessed a distinct literary, artistic, or scientific impress
and value. The locality should be the British Museum, because, while we
are able to receive articles from any other place on deposit, we are
disabled from even temporarily parting with our own. If so, the
management must, of course, rest with the Museum authorities, as we
could not allow an _imperium in imperio_. It will be admitted that under
the present Principal Librarian the Museum has fully earned the
confidence of the public, and that this has been largely gained by the
readiness shown to enlist mechanical processes in aid of library work,
particularly printing and electricity. The introduction of photography
would be but a further development of the same principle; and although
much consideration and discussion will evidently be necessary, I am not
without hope that Mr. Bond, who has brought print into the catalogue and
electricity into the Reading Room, may make the sun-crowned nymph, now
an inmate who charges for her lodging instead of paying for it, a
daughter of the house. Many questions will arise which only experience
can solve. The work which the institution does for itself and that which
it does for others must not be allowed to get into each other's way, and
the adjustment of the scale of charges will require serious
consideration. On the one hand, the very essence of the scheme is to
reduce the cost of photography for literary or educational purposes to a
minimum; and high prices would evidently be extortionate when the main
elements of cost had been suppressed. On the other hand, the _bona
fides_ of customers must be guaranteed; and the Treasury will scarcely
help unless the obligation to recoup it as far as possible is
acknowledged and acted upon. The best principle, I apprehend, would be
to proportion charges as nearly as possible to the expenditure of
material—a variable quantity, depending upon the amount of work
done—and to look upon the salaries of the photographic officer and his
assistants as expenses to be covered as far as possible—but with which
the State is not bound to concern itself more than with the salaries of
other literary and artistic servants from whom it does not expect
pecuniary returns.
Ere I quit the subject, suffer me to advert to one aspect of it of
national and even international concern. I allude to the service which
photography can render in the preservation and dissemination of the
national records. The Record Office, in London at least, is no doubt as
nearly fireproof as a building can be made; its guardians must say
whether it is so absolutely impregnable as to supersede all need for the
precaution of making a duplicate copy of any of its treasures. But I
know that it has unique documents relating to the most interesting
events in Scotch history, facsimiles of which would be acceptable
throughout Scotland. I imagine that these are but types of a large class
of documents; and I am sure that the sight of papers relating to
memorable transactions, or bearing the signatures of memorable men,
would foster historical study and patriotic feeling throughout the
length and breadth of the land. But there is another class of records,
for whose safety and accessibility measures should undoubtedly be taken.
I refer to the parish registers. This is no new idea; it has been
frequently proposed that such documents should be removed to London and
collected in a great central repository. To this, as regards the
originals, I cannot assent, both from respect for the rights of property
and from the fear lest some unlucky day the registers of the entire
kingdom might disappear in one common catastrophe. Photography would
solve the problem. With regard to the international aspect of the
question, it may be fairly expected that if we lead, other nations will
follow, and that we shall have to follow if we let them lead. Suppose
that France and we have taken the step in concert, we shall be in a
position to mutually exchange copies of all the important documents
illustrative of the history of either nation contained in the archives
of both. Suppose Italy and Spain to join, and we may have the chief
materials of English history at home, and shall no longer be obliged to
despatch agents to calendar Venetian state papers, or unriddle the
ciphered scrolls of Simancas. The conception is so fruitful, its
application is so manifold and momentous, that I half recoil, like Fear,
afraid of the picture myself have painted. Yet I believe there is
nothing in it that upon sober examination will not be found to follow
naturally from the simple propositions with which I began, that the
photographic reproduction of national property should be the concern of
the nation; and that to a great museum or library photography should be,
not a tool, but a limb.
FOOTNOTES:
[234:1] Read before the Library Association, Dublin, September 30, 1884.
THE TELEGRAPH IN THE LIBRARY