Books: History on Plates

MR. LINCOLN'S CAMERA MAN — Roy Meredith—Scrlbner ($7.50).

One blazing hot day in July 1861, a little bespectacled man with a Vandyke beard, a big nose, and wearing a white linen duster and a straw hat, hurried across the Long Bridge at Washington, D.C. on to the territory of a newly proclaimed nation, the Confederate States of America. He joined the crush of junketing Congressmen, society ladies in carriages and pleasure seekers who had jaunted out to see the Union Army trounce General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard's Confederates at Bull Run. The little man...