Over 20 years ago, when I became interested in early Indian photography, I was sitting across the desk of a prominent American scholar.

He was reading to me the titles of Murree photographs from a Samuel Bourne catalog.

Murree was the hill-station in Pakistan to which I was headed. He would not let me look at the catalog, so valuable and new was this kind of information.

Others were more generous. Without being asked, a librarian at George Eastman House photocopied and mailed to me the complete Himalayan narratives by Samuel Bourne published in the British Journal of Photography during the 1860s.

In those days, the Getty in Los Angeles gave researchers ten (!) free 8 by 10 glossy reproductions of any images they wanted following each research visit. They have a large Bourne collection. I visited as often as I could get an appointment at the Getty's then temporary offices on the snaky end of Wilshire Boulevard.

Together, the revelatory texts and images led me to begin researching Raj photography in earnest.

Today research possibilities are entirely different. The Internet and email are major tools. It is easier than ever to find obscure books.

Thanks to the Pagoda Tree Press reprint of Photographic Journeys in the Himalayas, Bourne's exceptional narrative can be at everyone's fingertips for less than the cost of an image reproduction at a major archive.

Photographic Journeys in the Himalayas also comes with a list of all Bourne's 2,200 Indian images. Such a full catalog is available for no other early photographer of the subcontinent. As a surprise, it has numerous key photographs sprinkled throughout Bourne's stories of his three trips to the mountains.

In the past 20 years, Samuel Bourne has gone from someone known by a limited circle to recognition as one of the first great landscape photographers anywhere in the world. His writings show he was one of the best storytellers too. There is nothing quite as gripping as these early documents in later Indian photographic history.

He tells of struggles in an accessible form that highlight the enormous effort that went into early albumen imagery.

The credit for this publication goes to Hugh Rayner. He has been on Bourne's trail for many years, and brought together every scrap of information to build this collection of Bourne's written work and photographic catalog. This includes newly found late life poems published here for the first time.

Hugh's efforts show how singular efforts can move the field forward so far for so many others.

Remarkable too is the fact that when Rayner found valuable new Bourne material, he re-published the first edition of the book to include it.

Like Bourne, Hugh is taking advantage of new printing technologies that make small press runs viable. This even while larger commercial publishers have found the market becoming riskier. Hugh's efforts and hard work - for there is still a lot of laborious type-setting and fact checking involved - have led to hard-to-find memoirs of other photographers, like Fred Bremner's My Forty Years in India and Randolph Holmes Camera Shikar in Kashmir.

For my part, I can't wait for the next twists of the Bourne story in the 3rd edition.