AN ALBUM compiled by the first photography club in the world has landed a Swindon auction house its biggest ever sale.

The book of 1840s calotypes the earliest form of printed photograph raised £190,000 at Dominic Winter Book Auctions.

Put together by the Edinburgh Calotype Club, it includes scenes of contemporary buildings in Edinburgh and St. Andrews.

Dominic Winter photo-graphic consultant, Jeffery Bates, said the pictures were "the very earliest kind of pictures that were printed on paper and that look like the pictures we see today".

He said the members of the club were very rich men who could afford the then crippling cost of using calotype technology, which was invented by Lacock based inventor William Henry Fox-Talbot.

Mr Bates added that the club was "the first photographic club in the world", and the album one of only two made by it.

A number of Scottish institutions were keen to pair it with the other album, which is on display in an Edinburgh library.

A London bookseller bought the Swindon album yesterday on behalf of an unnamed institution, and Mr Bates said he hoped it would be returning north of the border.

"It would be nice if it went back to Scotland," he said. "It's like a missing piece of a jigsaw."