Wonderful coffee table style book. Hugely influenced my interest in early photography. ( )

An abridged collection of photos from the early days of photography. ( )

A "family album" of a vanished America, these photographs cover a 75-year period from 1839 to World War I. A fascinating array of images; I have always been intrigued by old photographs. They show the reality of the past as no other medium can. Pg. 326, by the by, has a couple from around the turn of the last century, posed on a pair of Henry Shaw's giant lily pads in his Tower Grove Park. But all of these photographs are compelling and evocative, and they are annotated as well as could be done considering their antiquity. ( )

Cover subtitle: How we looked and how we lived in a vanished U.S.A./ Reprint. Originally published: New York : American Heritage Pub. Co., 1968. With new introd.