My Summer in the Alps was privately printed in New York in 1914. My Summer runs to 21 numbered pages, and on the verso of the last appears the following edition statement: “Three hundred copies on Dutch handmade paper privately printed for the author by Frederic Fairchild Sherman.” What’s more, as the verso of the title page makes clear, Williams took the trouble of copyrighting the work. All in all, My Summer is a small but handsome example of bookmaking at its finest.

Bruno Wehrli and his brothers Harry (1869–1906) and Arthur (1876–1915) founded the “Gebrüder Wehrli” photography business in Kilchberg in the 1890s. By 1897 their company had four employees and they were able to open a second store. In 1904 they merged with the Bachmann photo shop in Lucerne and founded the stock corporation “Photography-Verlag Wehrli AG”.

In 1904 they took what was then the largest landscape photograph in the world for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. This showed a panorama of the Gornergrat and was 20.5 m long and 2.25 m high. The images were exposed on 18 cm × 24 cm plates and copied onto silver bromide paper. The plates and silver bromide paper were supplied by the company J. H. Smith & Co. made from Zurich. [1]