Anna Atkins was not a professional photographer, and the book that carries her name was not, at first, a book in any ordinary sense. A dedicated amateur botanist and the daughter of a prominent British scientist, she began experimenting with the new medium soon after William Henry Fox Talbot announced his invention of photography in 1839. Four years later she turned to the cyanotype process, recently devised by her friend Sir John Herschel, as a way of circulating her growing collection of native seaweeds. The result, Photographs of British Algæ: Cyanotype Impressions, is widely described as the first book illustrated by photography and the earliest sustained application of the medium to science.

The original was issued in hand-stitched fascicles, delivered at intervals over roughly a decade to the people Atkins called her botanical friends. Nearly two dozen substantially complete or partial copies are known, and no two agree exactly: they differ in appearance and often in the number and arrangement of plates. The set of thirteen parts she gave to Herschel, now in the Spencer Collection of The New York Public Library and preserved by generations of his family as he received it, is the copy this facsimile follows.

Steidl’s edition reproduces the recto and verso of each plate, so the images can be read as Atkins intended them to be — as bound volumes to be lingered over page by page, not as isolated pictures. The book runs to 42 pages in hardcover, and its list of contributors includes Joshua Chuang and Larry Schaaf, whose precise roles the volume’s own credits define; the photographs themselves remain Atkins’s alone.

The interest for a collector is twofold. These photograms are among the earliest and most persuasive demonstrations that photography could describe the natural world precisely, and the direct exposure of algae against sensitised paper gives the blueprints a graphic force that later botanical illustration seldom matched. The facsimile also holds on to something more perishable: the structure of a publication made by hand, in parts, across years — a form that survives in very few copies and almost never intact. Atkins’s project stands where botany, printing and photographic experiment meet, and this edition makes that meeting legible.