Featured on PDR in the collection A Bug’s Life: David and Marian Fairchild’s Book of Monsters (1914)

David Fairchild and his wife, Marian — the daughter of Alexander Graham Bell — published Book of Monsters after a laborious summer creating some of the earliest macrophotographs of tiny creatures in their backyard just north of Chevy Chase, Maryland. Filled with full-page images of recently deceased insects, spiders, myriapods, and pill bugs, the book brought a miniature world to life in a new way, turning bugs into fantastical beasts. By placing the reader face-to-face with the barely visible, Book of Monsters made the familiar into the exotic through the magic of scalar enlargement.