# 18142

THE LIVERPOOL DRY PLATE AND PHOTOGRAPHIC COMPANY

[EARLY PHOTOGRAPHY] The Liverpool Dry Plate and Photographic Printing Company. Price list of Collodio-Bromide plates.

$375.00 AUD

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Liverpool, U.K. : Henry Greenwood, Printer, [1873]. Octavo sheet, 200 x 125 mm, printed recto only; [together with] the original covering letter relating to the price list, in manuscript on the company letterhead, octavo, 2 pp, written by the owner Peter Mawdsley to an American customer, George May Powell, dated 6 September 1873, explaining the firm’s discount policy for bulk orders of at least 100 plates; ‘I do not do Solar printing and I do not understand the enlarging of negatives … Many plates have been sent to America from time to time but we have no agent there’; signed ‘Yours faithfully, Peter Mawdsley’; both items in very good condition, with original folds.

The first incarnation of The Liverpool Dry Plate and Photographic Printing Company, a business partnership between Peter Mawdsley, a member of the Liverpool Amateur Photographic Association, and Joseph Guyton, was established in the early 1860s. It played a highly significant role in the development of early photography, being the first firm to prepare and sell plates for Bolton and Sayce’s revolutionary collodion emulsion process (mixing silver bromide into collodion to form an emulsion), introduced in 1864. After the business partnership dissolved in May 1867, Mawdsley was joined by William James Stillman, and the enterprise continued at its premises in Seaforth, near Liverpool, until it was dissolved in 1877. (earlyphotography.co.uk).

The price list we offer here provides prices per dozen for twelve different plate sizes. It also advertises that intermediate plate sizes can be prepared to order. Furthermore, ‘The Plates are admirably adapted for the production of Transparencies for Stereo. or Lantern Slides’. The price list, accompanied by Peter Mawdsley’s handwritten business letter, represents a wonderful piece of early photographic history.