Photographic Tent—Restoration of Faded Negatives.—In Vol. vii., p. 462., I find M. F. M. inquiring for a cheap and portable tent, effective for photographic operations out of doors. I have for the last two years, and in mid-day (June), prepared calotype paper, and also the collodion glass plates, for the camera, under a tent of glazed yellow calico of only a single thickness: the light admitted is very great, but does not in the least injure the most sensitive plate or paper. It is made square like a large bag, so that in a room I can use it double as a blind; and out of doors, in a high wind, I have crept into it, and prepared my paper opposite the object I intended to calotype.
I should be glad it any of your readers would inform me how a failed negative calotype can be restored to its original strength. I last year took a great number, some of which have nearly faded away; and others are as strong, and as able to be used to print from, as when first done. The paper was prepared with the single iodide of silver solution, and rendered sensitive with aceto-nitrate sil. and gallic acid in the usual way. I attribute the fading to the hyposulphate not being got rid of; and the question is, Can the picture he restored?
Are Dr. Diamond's Notes published yet?
S. S. B., Jun.
Replies to Minor Queries.
Gibbon's Library (Vol. vii., p. 407.).—I visited it in 1825, in company with Dr. Scholl, of Lausanne, who took charge of it for Mr. Beckford. It was sold between 1830 and 1835, partly by auction, partly by private sale in detail.
James Dennistoun.
Robert Drury (Vol. v., p. 533.).—I am afraid that the credit attachable to Drury's Madagascar is not supported or strengthened by the announcement that the author was "every day to be spoken with" at Old Tom's Coffee House in Birchin Lane. The Apparition of Mrs. Veal, and other productions of a similar description, should make us very doubtful as regards the literature of the earlier part of the eighteenth century. Might not a person have been suborned to represent the fictitious Robert Drury, to the benefit of the coffee-house keeper as well as the publisher? I am induced to express this suspicion by a parallel case of the same period. The Ten Years' Voyages of Captain George Roberts, London, 1726, is universally, I
believe, considered fictitious, and ascribed to Defoe; yet at the end of the work we find: