Armstrong's emphasis is on British books. Not only was it in an English book that the paper photograph was first described and published, but the range of subject matter of nineteenth-century British photographically illustrated books prior to the 1880s was as rich as it was peculiar and sometimes recalcitrant. Armstrong focuses on one book about photography (Talbot's The Pencil of Nature); one "scientific" book (Anna Atkins's Photographs of British Algae); two travel narratives, one factual and one fictional (Francis Frith's Egypt and Palestine Photographed and Observed and his illustrated edition of Longfellow's novel Hyperion: A Romance); and one book of poetry (Julia Margaret Cameron's Illustrations to Alfred Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King); as well as some miscellaneous books from the 1870s. According to Armstrong, art history has tended to remove the historic photograph from its printed and published context. Moving back and forth between close looking and equally close reading, she reinserts the photograph into the bookfrom which it was taken.