John Wade began collecting cameras in the early 1970s, an interest which led him to a fascination for researching some of the more obscure aspects of photographic history.

A past editor of the UK photographic magazine Photography, he has been a full-time freelance writer and photographer for more than 25 years, having written half-a-dozen books and numerous magazine articles about classic and collectable cameras for the British and American photographic press, as well as for antique and collecting magazines.

His interest in the Wrayflex began when he first saw - and later managed to buy - a rare prototype that didn't fit in with any of the other known models. Soon, a fascination developed for the cameras and the company that made them, leading to meetings with several former employees of the company, most of them by then in their seventies and eighties, and one in his late nineties!

At the start of his researches, Wade knew only that the Wrayflex was England's only serious attempt at making a 35mm single lens reflex. But then he discovered that the original version that Wray patented in 1947 was never built; and that although invented by an Englishman, much of his work, including drawing up the plans had probably taken place while the inventor had been in Germany.

The more he probed, the more he discovered, from more unknown prototypes to the unexpected information that Wrayflex cameras had been used in a NASA-sponsored experiment as part of the American space programme. Then there were the other cameras that Wray made and sold before and after the Wrayflex, all of them as unusual and interesting as the Wrayflex.

In the end, he had so much information, and so many fabulous pictures, that it would have been a crime not to turn them into a book. So he did, and this is it. Hopefully readers will enjoy reading it as much as the author enjoyed researching and writing it.

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Other camera collecting books written by John Wade include:-

• The Collector's Guide to Classic Cameras 1945-85

• The Collector's Guide to Cine Cameras

•Spy Camera: The Minox Story (co-authored with Morris Moses)

• The Camera, from the 11th Century to the Present Day

• A Short History of the Camera

• Cine Cameras

• Cameras in Disguise

• Clockwork Cameras