AUTOTYPE NOTES - NEW SERIES, no. 1, Thursday, January 25th, 1894 to no. 36, Christmas, 1896. LACKING no. 18 [July, 1895]. TOGETHER WITH : Permanent Platinum Printing Paper. Autotype Co. London. September 1895. pp. [4]. AND : Trade Price List of Autotype Enlargements. Printing, Finishing in Monochrome and Colours, Making Negatives, etc. Autotype Co. London. Sept. 1894. pp. 8. Original wraps, vertical fold, a bit dusty, else very good.

The Autotype Company. London. 1894-1896. 35 parts. Small 4to. ALL PUBLISHED ?. pp. 144. Occasional diagram in text, one Rontgen photograph. All single sheets folded to give 4pp., all folded twice horizontally, some of them also with a bottom edge folded, a couple of early issues with a single rust hole affecting a few letters, the odd issue dusty on the front page, issue no.1 with a small tear in the fore-edge margin with slight loss not affecting text, overall a clean and bright run of a rare company newsletter. *A rare run of this important photographic supplier's newsletter. COPAC does not list this, the NEW SERIES, and has only one reference to the OLD SERIES, 1878 to 1894, held in Imperial College. I cannot trace a copy outside of the UK. The first patent for the autotype process of permanent photographic reproduction was filed in 1868 by Joseph Swan. Later in the year he sold the English rights to John Robert Johnson, a chemist and Ernest Edwards, a photographer. A third partner, John Frederick Boyes, joined them and together they set up the Autotype Printing and Publishing Company Limited, with offices at No. 5 Haymarket and a factory in Brixton. They subsequently acquired other patents and developed new processes, pigments and papers and today the business is subsumed in the MacDermid-Autotype Co. The Notes gives a substantial insight into these technological developments, with many articles, particularly relating to carbon and platinum printing papers and techniques. There are detailed reviews of photographic exhibitions, several discussions on studio lighting, furniture and accessories by VALENTINE BLANCHARD, sections dealing with copyright issues, and a Notes & News section with up-to-date commentary. Of especial interest are the accounts of X-Rays - in the APRIL 1896, Notes & News, there are reports of the London photographic demonstration of the newly discovered X-Rays, by the impresario Harold Lundy, the work itself conducted by Friese Green. And from America, comes the report of work by Edison. There are two further accounts in the MAY 1896 issue, one of experiments by Salvioni in Italy, the other of work by Laurence and Cooke, London. In this issue also, there is an account of a meeting of the Ealing Photographic Society at which Mr. Dowsing gave a demonstration of his X-Ray apparatus, here illustrated by a Rontgen photograph, one of the earliest such illustrations, following upon Rontgen's announcement in December 1895. There are a few more notes on the subject in the AUGUST 1896 issue. VALENTINE BLANCHARD [1831-1901], one of the pioneer photographers of the 1860s and a later member of the Brotherhood of the Linked Ring, he was an early producer of stereophotographs, large scale portraits and carte de visites, and following his retirement from commercial photography in 1892, he became a prolific journalist in the subject. WALTER STRICKLAND BIRD had been a manager at the Autotype Co., but in 1873, he and two partners, Sawyer and Spencer, bought out the company and its patents and set up on their own. The Autotype Fine Art publishing company remained a separate entity, working on its own. In 1875, these two firms amalgamated again.