By mid-1844, Talbot's commercially produced Pencil of Nature appeared, confirming Atkins's October 1843 fascicle as the earlier photographically illustrated book.
By June 1844, copies of William Henry Fox Talbot's The Pencil of Nature—often cited as the first commercially produced book illustrated with photographs—began to appear in print. This timing is historically significant because it retrospectively confirms that Anna Atkins's privately issued Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, whose first fascicle appeared in October 1843, actually preceded Talbot's celebrated publication by several months.
This distinction matters greatly in the history of photography: while Talbot's work was aimed at a commercial audience and widely marketed, Atkins's book was self-published and distributed privately among her network of botanical friends and scientific correspondents. Because of this private distribution, her priority went largely unrecognized by the broader public and photographic establishment for well over a century.
Modern scholarship and institutions, including the New York Public Library and the Natural History Museum, London, have since firmly established Atkins's chronological precedence, repositioning her as the true originator of the photographically illustrated book format. This reassessment has been part of a broader historical effort to recognize women's overlooked contributions to the early history of photography and scientific publishing.
Atkins's achievement illustrates how private, non-commercial scientific labor by women—often overlooked by contemporaries focused on public and commercial milestones—can nonetheless hold genuine historical priority once properly investigated.