Today we have plenty of cameras that will take an up close and personal look at the the creatures that surround us, down to microscopic size, as we've seen in the Nikon Small World photography competitions. But 100 years ago, just seeing a spider's face was a rare treat. Sure, there were people who had mounted insect collections, but those weren't available to everyone, and David Fairchild considered them unnatural after they had dried up. He and his wife Marian published a book in 1914 full of photographic images of the insects, spiders, and other tiny creatures in their backyard called Book of Monsters.
Cameras of the time were not up to macrophotography, so they came up with a system that separated the lens from the photographic plate by a cardboard tube that went up to twenty feet long! The exposures were between 50 and 80 seconds, so they couldn't use live specimens, but their "fresh" specimens were fixed with wax to remain in place for the photo shoot. The text in Book of Monsters was overly dramatic, like a spider killing a fly was a “true picture of merciless cruelty.” The spider just considers it lunch, but such prose got kids interested in the book. Read about the making of Book of Monsters and see a gallery of the images it contained at the Public Domain Review. -via Nag on the Lake