Early Victorian photograph albums have particularly thin pages and are closed with a non-expanding clasp as they were designed for the thinner cartes-de-visite and cabinet photographs manufactured in the 1860s and 1870s. By the late 1870s thicker and thicker card was being used for both cdvs and cabinet photographs and album pages had to be correspondingly fatter. I tend to leave most of our early albums empty for fear of damaging them with unsuitable later photographs (unless of course I have collected enough early portraits to fill one…)
