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Five weeks, and seventeen back-and-forth notes and letters. That’s what it took for the Folger Shakespeare Library’s first director, William Slade, to overcome the architects’ doubts that the library really did need a costly No. 4 Photostat machine and that it really was worth the “troublesome and expensive job” of making it fit into a two-room suite designed for a smaller, cheaper, No. 2 Photostat machine. 1 Why was it so important for the Folger to have a high-capacity Photostat machine?
Simply put, photostats revolutionized the study of rare books in the 1910s and 1920s. 2 For the first time, libraries could quickly make reasonably affordable reproductions of their holdings available for consultation off site. Research that had once been cost-prohibitive because it required in-person travel or photography suddenly became possible.
Traditional photography had been used for reproducing rare books since at least the late 1850s, but it was expensive and time-consuming. 3 With traditional photography, the camera captures a latent image on light-sensitive transparent film or glass that is then developed and fixed to produce a transparent negative. Next, the transparent negative is exposed onto light-sensitive paper, and then that latent image is developed and fixed to create a positive image on paper. Photostats completely bypass the film stage by exposing the image directly onto a long roll of light-sensitive paper, and greatly speed up the other steps by having them all happen inside the machine while new images continue to be taken.
City of Winnipeg Archives. Photostat Camera and Operator, 1954 (A568 File 15 Item 6)
Basically, the photostat machine is a great big camera with a built-in processing lab attached at the back. The operator puts an original document face-up on a flat bed in front of the camera, and the camera’s lens assembly projects an image of the document onto the roll of sensitized paper. After about ten seconds of exposure, the operator winds the paper forward for the next shot, moving the exposed paper past a sheet trimmer and into the chemical baths that develop and fix the image. Photostats could be air-dried, but to speed up the process, the Folger’s machine included an electric dryer with conveyor belts.
The Folger’s  photostat machine was built around an opening in a wall wall so that the paper coming out the back could arrive in a darkroom (the “Laboratory” in the architectural plan). However, because the rooms had been built for a smaller machine, space was tight, and the plumbing and electrical outlets were in the wrong places. With plenty of help from the Washington office of the Photostat Corporation (which also preferred that the library purchase the $2,190 No. 4 system, not the No. 2) the architects managed to make it work in the existing space, seen below in a detail from the original plans for the Folger’s second floor. 4
Detail of Photostat Room and Laboratory from Sheet 5 (“Second Floor”) of Folger Shakespeare Library plans, Nov. 4, 1929.
The importance of the photostat room was noted in press and publicity when the library opened in 1932. For instance, a gushing description of the Tudor-style Reading Room in a supplement to The Washington Post ends with “[Mr. Folger’s] capacity to sympathize with the modern scholar’s requirements is exemplified by the fact that a properly equipped photostatic laboratory is hidden behind the paneling.”  5
Because photostats are direct images, the blacks and whites are reversed, like a film negative in traditional photography. The Folger copy of the 1656 translation of Jean-Nicolas de Parival’s History of this iron age (Hamnet record) includes an example:
Damaged leaf followed by a negative photostat of the same leaf from another copy of the book. Notice that the photostat itself has deteriorated: the “silver mirroring” or “silvering” causing reflection in parts of the dark areas is the result of silver oxidation in the light-sensitive emulsion.
As you can see from the photo, the last leaf of the volume has major losses to the text. Photostats of the same pages from an undamaged copy were inserted when the book was conserved and rebound. 6
Two missing leaves provided separately as positive photostats from another copy.
Because positive photostats are second-generation copies, the letters are usually a bit fuzzier than in negative photostats, but they’re much easier on the eye to read.
The Bibliographical Society of America devoted their 1921 annual meeting to the topic of photostats and photographic reproductions in bibliographic research. Reading The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, volume 15, part 1, you could substitute “digital image” for “photostat” and almost invariably have something that sounds like it was written in the past ten or fifteen years.
Just as people today dream of digitizing at least one copy of every book ever, people in 1921 dreamed of a coordinated system to make a negative photostat of every book. George P. Winship, librarian of the Widener Collection at Harvard, wrote about how “this whole problem of photostatting for libraries can be handled satisfactorily” by means of a “grand central storehouse, centrally located and big enough to keep all the negatives that have been or are to be made, with facilities for making prints promptly whenever a student anywhere wants them for use.”  7 To be fair, he was only talking about every book and future book in American libraries, not the whole world, but that’s still a lot of books.
Henrietta C. Bartlett, who used photostats extensively when comparing Shakespeare quartos, included a warning about their limitations in her praise:
The only serious “out” is that one cannot tell anything about the paper and therefore cannot tell whether the leaf is genuine or spurious, whether it originally belonged there or was from another copy or edition, whether some leaves have been canceled or not. … The photostat is better, I believe, than any other method of reproduction, but it should not be considered of equal value to the student with the original. 8
During the discussion period following Chester March Cate’s presentation “The Photostat and the Huntington Library,” attendees “spoke of the possibility of altering or faking photostat copies” and worried about “the permanency of reproduced copies.” 9 H. H. B. Meyer, Chief Bibliographer at the Library of Congress, supported the plan to create a central depository of photostatic negatives, and agreed that the Library of Congress would be the best place for it, but had to allow as how it was impossible at the moment because the library “was unable to do its own work properly, owing to lack of resources.” 10 Does any of this sound familiar?
Only one part of the 1921 discussion struck me as unfamiliar, and I’m very glad for that. Chester March Cate wrote that pointing out an error in another library’s catalog produced “so spirited a reply” from the librarian that he didn’t want to ask the same librarian to double-check the imprint of another book, which he suspected had been mis-transcribed in the catalog. “He, however, readily acceded to our request for a photostat; and by that means we were able to to confirm our suspicions of his error and at the same time to preserve cordial relations between the two institutions. 11 If you suspect something in the Folger Shakespeare Library’s catalog is incorrect, please DO let us know by emailing HamnetHelp@folger.edu. Our reply will also be spirited, but the energy will be an enthusiastic “Thank you!”
Letters and notes dated between March 19, 1931 and April 23, 1931 in the “Cret, Paul Philippe” correspondence file for 1931. The “troublesome and expensive” warning comes in a letter from J.E. Hutchison to Paul Philippe Cret dated March 31, 1931.
Like “Xerox” and “Kleenex”, the Photostat brand became so closely associated with the product that the trademarked name became genericized in American English. In British English, the trade name “Rotograph” became the generic term for the same thing.
The earliest example I know is a reproduction of the 1617 edition of the anonymous play The Famous Victories of Henry the fifth that was produced in 1857. According to the handwritten note by J.O. Halliwell-Phillipps on the endleaves of the four copies at the Folger, “The negatives are destroyed and only ten perfect copies are preserved.” They are now almost illegibly pale.
The suite has since been further subdivided, and is now a shared semi-open office area adjacent to the elevator.
James Waldo Fawcett, “Folger Library Called Gem of Architecture,” The Washington Post, April 23, 1932, page 1 of supplement.
Note that this practice was short-lived. More often, photostats of missing or damaged pages in the Folger collection are housed in separate envelopes shelved next to the volume, where the photographic paper will not be in contact with the original paper in the book.
Letter dated July 5, 1921, as cited by Frederick Ives Carpenter, “The Photographic Reproduction of Rare Books,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, volume 15, part 1, page 41.
Letter cited in George Watson Cole, “The Photostat in Bibliographical and Research Work: A Symposium,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, volume 15, part 1, page 14.
From the minutes of the annual meeting on June 22, 1921, as published in The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, volume 15, part 1, page 50
“Discussion of Photographic Reproduction” at the December 21, 1921, meeting of  the Bibliographical Society of America as summarized in the minutes published in The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, volume 15, part 1, page 52.
Chester March Cate, “The Photostat and the Huntington Library, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, volume 15, part 1, page 19.
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Erin Blake is currently the Senior Cataloger responsible for art and manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library. From 2000 to 2014, Erin served as the Folger's Curator of Art and Special Collections. In 2014, she became Head of Collection Information Services. After a four-year tour of duty in senior management, she happily returned to working hands-on with the collection in 2018. In addition to her Folger work, Erin teaches The History of Printed Book Illustration in the West at Rare Book School, and is chief editor of Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials (Graphics).
August 1, 2015 at 11:00 am
I had no idea that Photostats were from the 1910s.
August 2, 2015 at 4:50 am
Fascinating topic! I’m wondering about a minor detail: when did the Folger get rid of its photostat machine?
August 3, 2015 at 11:53 am
I’ve been trying to find out, too. The best I’ve been able to determine so far is that it was definitely gone by 1974: that’s when the current longest-serving staff member started here, and she knows it was already gone then.
March 19, 2018 at 12:38 pm
Do you know whether the old Photostat machines could simultaneously make enlargements or reductions of the original they were copying?
And, if so, can you tell me anything about how the machines were configured to do that with some degree of precision?
All best, thanks for indulging my questions.
March 19, 2018 at 12:41 pm
Yes, Photostat machines could make enlargements or reductions by having the operator move the camera closer to or farther away from the original. By matching up numbers on a chart, the operator could be sure the resulting image would be of a specific enlargement or reduction percentage, and in focus.
There’s an explanation of how to do this on pages 11 through 13 of The Photostat and its operation (Rochester, N.Y.: Photostat Corp., [1936?]). Here’s a link to that section in a scanned copy from the University of Michigan: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015011240739?urlappend=%3Bseq=14. The chart with standard enlargements and reductions is on page 13.
June 16, 2020 at 7:44 am
My Aunt Frances Mary Reinwand ran the Photostat Department at Penn State University starting back in the 1930s to her retirement–probably in the 1960s. From the time I was only four I was taught to assist in the drying process, making sure the negatives moved along through a series of trays and onto the drying area properly. The drying area consisted of a long belt that ran in a sort of U-shape around the back of the second room. My aunt was quite the martinet and no one, no matter how important in the university hierarchy, dared give advice or, heaven forbid!, argue with her. The Penn State Photostat Dept. was located in the bottom level of Pattee Library and for some reason I always entered it through a window, dropping down onto my aunt’s desk. I was to become an adult before I went through the front door of Pattee. Thanks so much for the interesting article. I’ve been curious for years about Aunt Francey’s work. Her machine, though, wasn’t quite like the one pictured and for some reason I remember the camera and projector area, these in the front room, being enclosed in a large, glass square. It being so long ago that I may be incorrect. But, again, thanks for the article.
February 27, 2022 at 4:20 pm
I was a photostat operator at the Nixon Blue Print Company in Corpus Christi Texas when i was in middle school. This was maybe 1941-42. We had gas fired drum document dryers. You placed the object to be dried on the canvas belt and it went around the drum and came out dried. The first copy was a negative. If you wanted a positive copy you had to put the negative on the table and photograph it to get the positive copy. The table was moved up or down for enlargements and reductions. The developer was in the machine, your took it our and put into a fixer. At this time you could clean the photo with a chemical bath before drying. Hard to remember details as this was 80 years ago for me. RD
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