This comprehensive work will be appreciated by amateur and professional collectors as a long awaited composite guide to card photographs spanning nearly a century of examples dating from salt prints to picture postcards. The over three hundred illustrations are accompanied not only with value and dating guidelines, but also historical background on the development of the various card types. Included are family portraits, famous personalities, the frontier West, Civil War scenes, theatrical cards, oddities, foreign landscapes, and studio novelties. In fact, the profusely illustrated text is a documentary of a bygone era.