Probably the best book to read to get the flavor of what life was like for the nineteenth century photographer and how the photograph evolved in America.  It gets into all types of trivia, including the Levi Hill scandal, where the Matthew Brady negatives went (the collodion stripped from the glass substrate, which was then used for a greenhouse!), and the kinematoscope of Coleman Sellers, an 1860’s invention wherein the viewer witnessed a moving scene in 3-D!  (But not in color.)

This edition is a 1964 Dover reprint that I purchased in 1972 for the first photo-history course that I took at the University of Illinois from Wm. B. Becker, director of the American Museum of Photography.  The first edition came out in 1934, when there were a few Wet Plate Collodion photographers still alive and kicking, as the author remarks about discussions he had with W. H. Jackson!

This moderately priced text is chock full of fun facts or the photo-history student who wishes to delve a little deeper into American photography than the typical survey book allows. I use images and quotes from it in my Hisotry of Photographic Technology class in regards to tax stamps on cartes-des-visites to fund the Civil War to the tens of thousands of Yankee hens who gave up their inchoate young for the sake of albumen print-out paper.