Lot Details
Lot 501
ANNAN, THOMAS The Old Closes & Streets of Glasgow. Engraved by Annan from Photographs Taken For the City of Glasgow Improvement Trust.
Glasgow: James MacLehose & Sons, 1900. First expanded edition (and the first with photogravures), one of 100 copies on superior paper, specially printed for the Corporation of Glasgow. Publisher's rose cloth with the arms of the city in gilt, lettered in gilt on the spine. 15 x 11 inches (38 x 28 cm); [23], [1] pp.; 50 fine photogravures. Light wear and fading to the binding, lower fore-margin with a slight bump, the extreme edges of the plates with light foxing but the images and margins generally excellent.
This is the preferred issue on heavy paper of an important work in the history of photogravure, and was the most extensively illustrated form of this great work. The original edition of 1871 had just 31 albumen prints, and in a subsequent edition of 1878 forty carbon prints were included.
The impetus for the images was the 1866 Glasgow City Improvements Act, which addressed the conditions in the slums of the City by demolition, which actively began in 1871. Annan's photographic series started in 1868, and it is thus an important record of the era before urban renewal in Glasgow. It is also something of a milestone in documentary photography. For an interesting discussion of the ambiguities inherent in this work, see Lionel Gossman Thomas Annan of Glasgow pp. 89-123.
C
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