[The Guardian] Portrait cards that sparked a Victorian collecting craze – in pictures

Portrait cards that sparked a Victorian collecting craze – in pictures

After discovering an album of Victorian cartes de visite in an antiques market, Paul Frecker gave up his day job to become a dealer in vintage photographs. Now collected in a new book, these cards were “a photographic craze that seized the imagination of the British public at the beginning of the 1860s,” says the Scotland-based author. “Queen Victoria was one of the format’s biggest fans.” Initially a way of distributing family portraits to friends, the phenomenon soon extended to images of royals, celebrities and larger-than-life characters. “It really was a fervour: crowds often formed to ogle displays in stockists’ windows, to the extent that pavements were blocked and traffic was impeded.”

Cartomania by Paul Frecker (September Publishing, £40) is out on 6 June

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Source: Portrait cards that sparked a Victorian collecting craze – in pictures

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