Featured on PDR in the collection Specimens of Fancy Turning (1869)

This early photography book features thirty tipped-in albumen silver prints of geometric designs created on “the hand or foot lathe”. Resembling something between spirograph drawings and textbook diagrams of orbiting electrons, the figures were created using geometric, oval, and eccentric chucks and an elliptical cutting frame. Attributed to “an amateur” on its title page, the book is the work of Edward J. Woolsey (1803–1872), an heir of the mercantile Woolsey family and partner in the New York Patent Sugar Refinery. Along with his wife and first cousin Emily Aspinwall’s businessmen brothers, who built an improbable railway line in the early 1850s linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans across Panama, he invested in a well-known estate in Lenox, Massachusetts, and furnished it with eight miles of…