Owen Simmons

The Book of Bread. Text by Owen Simmons. Uncredited photographer. Maclaren & Sons, London, 1903. 360 pp. Large quarto. First edition. Hardbound with debossed title. 27 black-and-white and 11 color reproductions (8 tipped-in) plus 2 pasted-in silver gelatin prints.

Of all the books mentioned in Parr and Badger's The Photobook: A History, vol. I, one of the titles most often mentioned in reviews was this idiosyncratic (mainly because it is so doggedly literal) look at the world of bread. As they explain, even though the book was published in 1903, it is related to nineteenth century attempts to catalogue and classify the "things of the world." "Here, at the beginning of the twentieth century," they write, "one of the humblest, yet most essential of objects is catalogued as precisely, rigorously and objectively as any work by a 1980s Conceptual artist."… (meer)