Guide to the collections : Colombo Museum
A 1905 guide to the collections of the Colombo Museum in Sri Lanka, issued by the museum and printed at the Government press in Colombo for visitors and students of its antiquities. The pictures are halftone photographs of museum objects: a fish specimen photographed against a pale ground, a dark rectangular stone tablet shown rotated on the page with its inscribed surface faintly visible, and a dense woodcut-style border of a scaled creature. A designer might take from them the plain catalogue-plate look of early museum photography, with its generous margins and centred single objects.
