Book of Bread Postcards

These twelve anonymous photographs come from a collection of around forty black-and-white and color images of British and Irish loaves and slices of bread, created to illustrate a pioneering work on bread chemistry, and even a precursor to molecular gastronomy: Owen Simmons’s The Book of Bread, published in 1903. Over 400 pages and seven chapters, the book presents the conclusions drawn from more than 360 of the author’s own experiments. Its illustrations have been praised by Martin Parr and other photographers as anticipating the conceptual art of the 1980s.