Zenker, Wilhelm. Lehrbuch der Photochromie.

8vo, Berlin: for the author, 1868. First edition.

Published 12 June 2026 · 43 min

The book cost CHF 150, which the man at the till plainly considered theft on his part. A sober octavo in publisher’s boards, Berlin, 1868, written by a Gymnasium physics teacher and printed at his own expense — the surest bibliographic signal that nobody else believed in it. Wilhelm Zenker believed in it enough to bind a photograph into every copy.

Not any photograph. The frontispiece of the Lehrbuch der Photochromie is, as far as anyone has been able to show, the first colour photograph ever issued in a printed book — made by a process of standing light waves that Gabriel Lippmann would reinvent forty years later, collect a Nobel Prize for, and never quite credit. Zenker died a schoolteacher. His book died faster.

This episode follows the copy from a Zürich thrift shop through the literature of interference photography: how we established priority, what the plate actually shows, and why the censor of record here was not the state but simple indifference — the most efficient suppressor of books ever devised. We also telephone a physicist, who is patient with us.

• ☞  Zenker, W. Lehrbuch der Photochromie. Berlin: for the author, 1868. The copy in question.
• ☞  Lippmann, G. “La photographie des couleurs.” Comptes rendus, 1891 — the reinvention, sans credit.
• ☞  Bjelkhagen & Vukičević, on standing-wave photography and Zenker’s priority. Journal of Imaging Science, 2002.
• ☞  Episode transcript and full collation notes — available to readers of the Prospectus.