When I added Glass, Brass & Chrome. The American 35m Camera by Kalton C. Laue and Joe A. Bailey to my Amazon wish list I didn’t have high expectations. The cover had a not terribly good black and white picture of a camera on it and somehow I got the impression that the whole thing was little more than a photocopy. As expected for a book on this subject there were few reviews. Still it was one of a relatively small number of books on camera collecting so I thought I’d put it on the list. Someone gave it to me as a Christmas present and I was pleasantly surprised to find that I really enjoyed it.

The first part provides an overall history of 35mm photography noting how at first many considered it to be a passing fad that would never replace larger negatives. Different types of lenses, coatings, shutters, rangefinders are described. The evolution of film, in its different formats (at first not standardized), from black and white to color is covered as is the development and growth of flash photography. A chapter is devoted to meters and the final chapter in this part covers development, printing and projection of 35mm film.

The second, longer part, describes each of the major 35mm camera manufacturers and their products with chapters devoted to Argus, Universal, Kodak, Perfex, Bolsey, Kardon, and Bell & Howell. A number of less successful cameras (Clarus, Vokar, Zephyr, Detrola, Spartus, Winpro etc.) are grouped together in a chapter entitled “Has-beens and never weres”. A chapter is also devoted to 35mm stereo cameras. The book concludes with a chapter dealing with Kodak Instamatic cameras.

The book was first published in 1972 and then was re-issued in 2002. There are many useful black and white illustrations. I found the book to be easy to read and free from a lot of the technical jargon that seems to infect books of this type.

One of the things that struck me was the author’s absolute certainty that the Kodak Instamatic System was the format of the future and that the standard 35mm cartridge was a thing of the past. Interestingly despite the advent of digital photography the 35mm cartridge is still with us in 2016 while the last Kodak Instamatic camera was sold in 1988 and 126 film was discontinued in 2006.