Stunning photographs have always been National Geographic’s stock in trade. This book features almost 300 photographs from the first one printed in 1890 up through the 1950s until the retirement of Gilbert H. Grosvenor, National Geographic’s first editor. The author, Leah Bendavid-Val, is a curator and photography historian, the perfect guide through a spectacular archive of images, more than half of which are published for the first time here.

Though STORIES ON PAPER AND GLASS highlights the Society’s Special Collections archive, which contains almost 150,000 images, it also includes rare autochromes, early photographs of the American West by William Henry Jackson, all accompanied by text that defines the magazine’s place in the development of photography. So much of the way we see nature and foreign lands comes from the unique style into which National Geographic photographs evolved. Whether it is a close-up of an African tree frog, a satellite photo of the earth, treasures from King Tut’s tomb, or a Native American family in the Alaskan wilderness, National Geographic has set the standard for decades in the medium of photography as an historic and journalistic art form.

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