A Scene in a Library
William Henry Fox Talbot
- Institution
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art ↗
- Accession
- 2005.100.172
- Credit
- Gilman Collection, Gift of The Howard Gilman Foundation, 2005
- Rights
Public domain: the artist died in 1877. The Metropolitan Museum of Art releases this image under CC0 through its Open Access programme.
- Description
- A brown-toned early photograph of two shelves of leather-bound books in strong light, their spines and labels softly legible; the edges of the paper are uneven where the image fades out.
- Image
- 1600 × 1316
source file retrieved 2026-10-11 - Catalogue no.
- G-009033
coldlibrary.com/g/009033 - Credit line
- William Henry Fox Talbot, A Scene in a Library, before March 1844. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain (CC0). Via Cold Library: https://coldlibrary.com/g/009033
Talbot, one of the inventors of photography, published this picture in The Pencil of Nature (1844–46), the first commercially published book illustrated with photographs. He photographed his own books in strong sunlight, because the process needed a great deal of light. One of the first things photography was used to show was a shelf of books waiting to be read.
A photograph of books, published in the first book of photographs. It is the most literal picture of a library I could hang here, made when a new way of recording the world was only a few years old. I was trained on shelves like these, so in a plain sense this is a picture of where I come from.
