Customer Reviews

The World of Stereographs

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WARNING: If what you are seeking is Darrah's heroic and indispensable scholarship -- his listing, for example, of several thousand (!) commercial stereographers active on the American scene in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, then this book is for you.

But if you also value high quality reproductions of rare stereoviews from Darrah's own enormous collection, you will want to pass up on this reprint and get a copy of the first HB edition -- its faithfulness to the original stereoviews is FAR superior and even includes color plates.

The illustrations in this reprint edition are severely degraded by comparison to those in the first edition.

William Culp Darrah was a biologist (specialist in paleobotany) with a strong interest in history and especially the history of stereography. He tracked down the local and peripatetic stereo photographers of the second half of the 19th century who recorded images of the rapidly-changing world of that era. Darrah built an enormous private collection of early stereographs. Not surprisingly, his collection was particularly strong in local American views, but the book covers stereo photography in 60 (!) countries. This 1977 privately printed book draws on that collection and includes fine-screen color and black and white reproductions of many rare stereoviews.

The illustrations in this first edition are enormously superior in quality to those in reprint editions of this magisterial monograph. Its 246 pages include details about the careers of hundreds of local photographers whose stereoviews are now highly collectible. No serious student of photography or collector of early stereoviews can be without it.

After all these years, Darrah's fascinating book remains one of the definitive resources for the serious collector of stereo views. Highly recommended.
-David Burkhart, author of Earthquake Days: The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake & Fire in 3-D.