Reviewed by Reppy Duart A Thousand Hounds: The Presence of the Dog in the History of Photography 1839 to Today by Raymond Merritt and Miles Barth Taschen, 2000; 600 pp. Wait! Keep reading! I know. You glanced at the title and thought, What the heck, and were ready to click away. But hold on. We've got something very unusual here. For 30 bucks you can get (almost) 2 CD's, or one mid-level video game, or (almost) a carton of cigarettes, or a dozen Big Macs. For the same amount you could buy A Thousand Hounds: The Presence of the Dog in the History of Photography 1839 to Today and take a mind trip like, I guarantee, you've never had. Hard to know where to start (or finish) about this jolting, riveting, unique book. Except for a few pages of intro and outro, and an occasional unobtrusive page of large print dog-quotes, it's 600 pages of dog pix from the earliest years of photography to the present. Dog pictures? 600 pages of dog pictures? Yep. And I'm here to tell you, even if you are indifferent to dogs, even if you pretty strongly dislike dogs, this is a riveting book. I'm a bit loath to write on at this point, because the book is so intensely visual, and the experience of the book is so completely non-verbal. But write on I will in an attempt to convince you to seek the book out. A Thousand Hounds comes at you in several ways, often simultaneously. For one thing it's an oblique history not so much of dogs or of photography but of us, at least the last two centuries of us. Most of the pictures are of dogs. Some have humans in them. But whether humans are present are not, our presence is strongly felt, defining not only the dog, but the unseen photographer, the technology, and of course whatever context is visible or implied around the dog. So we go from the intoxicatingly rich, laboriously realized wet-plate images of the early days of photography right up to the latest digital pixelized stuff. And out of the corner of your eye you can always see or sense people, their changes and their sameness across the decades reflected indirectly through the images of their mute, four-legged companions. Dozens, hundreds of history of photography books have been done. You leaf through them with mild curiosity, your attention occasionally captured by this or that unusual image. In A Thousand Hounds, page after page, your attention, you find (to your surprise, if you are a non-dog-lover) is captured and held by some kind of uncanny canine presence, a big part of which is those big dog eyes. You doubt me? I would've doubted me too until I picked up the book. They know, and we know, and they know we know that they are not the center of things. But there they are, with their seemingly infinite dog-patience, waiting for us to remember about fun. I tell you, I'm trying to put something into words here which ain't word-based. Cute? Sure there's cute here. But not much. And what there is is overhwelmed by the sheer flood of undiluted dogness. Big, small, beautiful, ugly, happy, sad. And always, always, just out of the frame, you know humans are lurking, waiting for the photographer to be done so they can get back to whatever kind of relationship they have with the dog in question. That's slightly misleading. There are some studio portraits, some posed nonchalantly, some with careful calculation. But most of the pictures are of dogs, indoors and out, caught in the act of being dogs. From a pooch lying with total indifference at the feet of Queen Victoria (in a pose which adds yet more new dimensions to the already overworked term "Victorian"), to long-forgotten hounds of war in the trenches of World War I, to 1930s studio shots of stars and their pets which look so slick you think they're going to slide off the page, to a kid reaching out to touch his mongrel friend dead in the street after being hit by a car, to six-year-old Jackie O. happily dwarfed by her mastiff, to Janis Jopling smiling improbably in her psychedelic Porsche with her mongrel friend happy beside her in 1969. And on and on. For 600 pages. Yes, Raymond Merrit and Miles Barth have given the world another dog book. But A Thousand Hounds is just a dog book like Hamlet is just a revenge drama.