A Discovery

I work at the Art Library here in Bristol, where we've made a discovery in the stacks.

Buried in a secure stack were about 250 paste-up cards with photos layed out for rephotographing for publication. They've got bits of retouching and printer's notes, and many of them are signed H. Robert Lewis or monogrammed H R L. I haven't been able to examine them all yet, but they are all from the 1920's, seeming to be mostly between 1923-28. There must be well over 1000 photos in all, all of them of West Country scenes and buildings. Anthony, the librarian, discovered them a few days ago. This library has seen several generations come and go, and it still has some secrets to yield. It looks as though this deposit was never catalogued. We've already seen it yield some results. Anthony had a visitor from Tyntesfield House (a National Trust property nearby), which was recently restored. Photographs discovered at random in this pile of cards were of Tyntesfield and yielded hitherto unknown details of the interior and the presence of a tennis court on one of the lawns. We've been trying this afternoon to research their provenance: they must have appeared in some local publication in the 1920's. We've found some trace of the photographer: he worked in Bristol as a photographer in the 1930's being last listed in local directories in 1940 (we idly speculate that he may have been killed in the Blitz). We'll certainly catalogue this collection, and hopefully go on to digitize it. It's been exciting and enchanting looking at these- I still haven't had a chance to peruse them at length- it's like something out of Shooting the Past. I'm sure (I think)no one will mind if I get a snap of a couple of the pictures next week and post them here.