JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
This scarce publication--Bildnisse zeitgennossischer Physiker--is a collection of about 320 portraits of leading physicists, collected together as an homage to Viktor von Lang on the occasion of his 70th birthday. The book was made to look like a family portrait album, resembling stiff cardboard pages that would have open places in the pages for a collection of cartes des visites to be slid into place via at slot at the bottom of the window. The physicist are from Germany, France, the UK, Spain, the U.S., Russia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Italy, Hungary, Japan, and a few other countries. Interesting to note here are the three portraits of women physicists: Margaret Maltby (Barnard, and first woman to receive a doctorate from a German university); A. Serdobinskaja (St. Petersburg); and O. Steindler (Vienna).
Lang (1838-1921, one of the founders of crystal physics and from 1865 to 1909 (!) the director of the Physikalisches Kabinett in Vienna) is listed in some references as the author though I’m pretty certain that the work was edited by someone else and presented to Lang as an appreciation for his long contribution to science. There is also no mention of a place of publication.
There are only four copies of this book found in WorldCat, and I only found a handful of the published photos online, so I thought to reproduce the book in its entirety Each section is expandable; the images were scanned at 200dpi so I think they will stand up nicely for individual reproduction.
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