My Story

For 9 years I've kept "my little treasure", 9 years since that day at the antique market of the city Bath in the UK where I first encountered it.

In the year 2004 I had stayed in Bath for a period of about a year. My middle son, then about 14 and a half, arrived in Britain to swim in the Bath University Excellence Center.

At the begging of our stay we lived approximately 200 meters from the city's antique market, which was held usually on Sundays. For me, it was the ideal place to spend Sundays and literally every week I looked forward for the market to reopen.

For years in Israel I had been collecting old documents and miscellaneous items related to the history of my country. In the UK a huge part of the antique world was revealed to me.

On one Sunday I visited the market looking for bargains. Suddenly I noticed a vendor literally sitting on the floor. In this market there are 2 types of vendors – the old and established ones with tables and parasols over their heads and the occasional vendors, usually sitting on the floor with very little goods for sale which are not very valuable.

In front of the vendor I saw four open, elongated boxes. Inside the boxes were rows of glass squares. I lingered in front of the vendor for a minute until he turned to me and said: "I'm not selling those individually, only the collection as a whole". He then started to tell me that this was a collection of pictures on top of glass that were taken on about the year 1937 by a well-known book store owner in Bath who travelled along with his friend in a car all across Europe while documenting the land by pictures. I was stunned!

This is actually a documentation of Europe on the eve of World War 2 and the eve of the demise of Europe's countries. I started to look at the photos and was amazed by their quality and the great compositions of the photographer. The vendor told me that when the photographer died, he, the vendor, had happened to buy the collection. Also, he said, he was only willing to sell the collection as a whole even though he could have made a much bigger profit by selling the collection in pieces.

I didn't think twice.
Almost without any negotiation I bought the collection and a few months later I brought it to Israel.

Almost ten years after purchasing the collection, I made the decision to publish it. The photos are incredible, the time-period is one of the most beautiful times of Europe, a time that only a short while later would become one of its hardest; And the story about the two friends travelling and documenting together is just fantastic.

Imagine today arriving at a foreign country – you would probably go about renting a car, travelling by it, sleeping in hotels or pensions, and finally – returning in planes. Everything today is easy and accessible, while at the time that the photos were taken, almost 80 years ago, everything was much more complicated. A couple of friends from bath travelled in an Austin 7 car, usually sleeping in a small pup tent, passing with the car from Britain to most of Europe's countries, travelling all the way to Corsica, Italy, spending days on days in ships and all that – with a car. The effort to make this kind of trip by car in those days was very big and substantial and the documentation that the two friends made is spectacular. I feel a great privilege to be able to publish a big part of the wonderful pictures they had taken.

I wanted to share this story with you, alongside with the technical work of publishing the photographs. I wish for us to understand more about these people – who they were, where they came from and why they decided to document Europe. To accomplish this I would need to research Bath and its surroundings, a research that is yet to come.

After many searches and examinations I found a nice couple in Israel who works in professional film development and print from various negatives and positives. I arrived in their lab, located in the industrial part of Tel-Aviv, and brought a part of the collection with me. They were amazed by it, and told me that for them it is a rare occasion to see a collection of photos from that time period with such high quality and of that magnitude.