Two albums of harmonograph drawings

A harmonograph is a drawing machine that uses two or three pendulums, swinging at once. One pendulum moves the pen while the others move the paper. As the pendulums lose energy the pen creates a curve that tightens toward the center of the sheet. In the 1870s and 1880s the machine was a popular parlor instrument and the drawings were often collected in albums.

These two volumes hold about seven hundred drawings, numbered, made over a period of years by Henry Procter of Southtown, Great Yarmouth. The early pages of the albums use a two-pendulum machine, with later using three pendulums and a rotating table. Procter was an engineer and founding director of Fellows & Co., the Southtown shipyard and engineering works. The albums passed to his son Edward Henry Procter (1894–1967), one of the first motorists in Great Yarmouth, who kept them until his death. His library was sold off by the estate, when the Yarmouth antiquarian bookseller David Ferrow bought the two volumes and brought them to the United States in October 1969.

Norfolk, where these albums were made, was the center of the harmonograph in England. The definitive book of the instrument, H. Irwine Whitty's The Harmonograph, was written and published in Norwich in 1893. The albums come from the same county and predate Whitty by fifteen to twenty years.