The Attitudes Of Animals In Motion Illustrated With The Zoopraxiscope PDF Download

This photographic album is very likely a manuscript mock-up by Muybridge in preparation for his 1881 publication, The attitudes of animals in motion : a series of photographs illustrating the consecutive positions assumed by animals in performing various movements. In Gordon Hendricks' Eadweard Muybridge: father of the motion picture (1975), the author describes Muybridge's preparations for the published copy of these photographs by saying that Muybridge had spent late 1880 and up to May of 1881 "... processing, printing, collating, and arranging his 1878-79 photographs into a book ... published in May 1881, with the copyright date being May 17". Hendricks questions that date, however, since "...the book could not have been written, printed, bound, sent to Washington, and copyrighted in two days" (p. 116). However, it was possible to send a mock-up to LC for copyrighting purposes and perhaps this copy was one of a few attempts at putting together a well-designed mock-up for that purpose. It is further possible that the "upright" layout of this book was found to be unfriendly to a well-designed mounting of the photographic sheets, leading Muybridge to decide that an "oblong" layout would be better for the publication. This would explain the differing formats between this manuscript (upright) and those of the published copies (oblong). In Anita Ventura Mozley's introduction to the Dover ed. of Muybridge's Complete human and animal locomotion (c1979), the 1881 ed. was described thus: "The edition was small, about ten albums of original photographs, accompanied by the title page, dedication to Stanford, an index and a brief description of the equipment ...". The vol. described in this record includes only [3] leaves of prefatory text (hand-lettered in ink in block capitals), and lacks a separate leaf containing a dedication to Stanford: p. [1] is the t.p., p. [2] gives the "Plan adopted in taking these photographs" (which is not as much a description of the equipment as it is a description of the operation) and p. [3] is the index, which is keyed to the particular arrangement of photos herein (which are on 81 leaves containing 196 mounted photographs, mostly found 2 to a leaf, but sometimes as few as 1, up to as many as 5 to a leaf). All photographs have hand-inked captions in block letters and all leaves with mounted photos are hand-foliated.