PICTORIAL SURVEY OF ESSEX.
3
results is to map out the country into districts and enlist as many
local helpers as possible. Negatives would be taken by the
local helpers and their friends, and prints by some permanent
process, such as the platinum or carbon processes, would be
made by them and forwarded to headquarters unmounted. Such
prints should be accompanied by descriptive labels, giving
information as to the object photographed, the date on which
the negative was taken (this may be of the greatest importance),
the process used for printing, and the name and address of the
photographer. Whole plate and half plate should be the standard
sizes for prints, but of course quarter plates would have to be
accepted for hand camera work.
These prints would then be carefully mounted, labelled and
stored in such a fashion that ready reference would be secured.
The Warwickshire prints are all mounted on card with sunk
mounts, and are then bound into book form for storage. If the
main object of the survey be, as it should be, the preservation of
such records for future reference by serious students, this method
seems to me to be not the best that could be adopted. Often
reference to a particular district means referring to a large
number of bulky volumes. Further, it is next to impossible to
secure that card mounts shall be made of materials sufficiently
pure to prevent the mount damaging the print; neither does
the material of which such mounts are made possess the
necessary lasting qualities. Suitable mounts can be made only
out of the purest paper.
The method of mounting and storage that I would suggest is
illustrated by the sample shown by me at the meeting of
the Essex Field Club in January last.
The prints are mounted on paper of good quality, about
the thickness of stout cartridge paper. All mounts are of foolscap
size, and will take a whole plate, a half plate, or two quarter
plate prints. Descriptive matter can be written on the back
of the mount. The prints are attached to the mount by pure
starch paste. The mounts are then bound together in a foolscap
size "Stolzenberg" File, each photograph being protected by a
sheet of tissue paper, bound in by the file between each mount.
These files will hold about 50 to 100 of such mounts. They
allow the prints to be examined as easily as though they were
bound up like a book, and yet permit of the removal of any one