Carrying Off the Palaces; John Ruskin’s Lost Daguerrotypes by John and Jenny Jacobson is one of the most fascinating books of its kind to appear in the last decade. It was published by Bernard Quaritch, the London book dealers, who summarize it as follows. “The inspiration for this book was a remarkable discovery made by the authors at a small country auction in 2006. One lightly regarded lot was a distressed mahogany box crammed with long-lost early photographs. These daguerreotypes were later confirmed as once belonging to John Ruskin, the great 19th-century art critic, writer, artist and social reformer. Moreover, the many scenes of Italy, France and Switzerland included the largest collection of daguerreotypes of Venice in the world and probably the earliest surviving photographs of the Alps.”