A Village Lost and Found: Scenes in Our Village by T. R. Williams. An Annotated Tour of the Celebrated 1850s Stereo Card Series [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

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This book comes in a hard slip cover along with Brian May's self designed OWL viewer which is in a separate, gold embossed folder. Every aspect of this book shows its quality in printing, binding and reproduction of these long forgotten photographs.

The images in this book are a series of hand tinted 3D stereocards from the 1850's of, what was thought to be, a lost village in the UK. They portray a pastoral and still slightly primitive way of life that was on the very cusp of ending with the coming industrial revolution. The photographer, T.R. Williams had to pose every shot and make sure the poses were held while he took one image and then another. Where I see window violations in all sorts of old stereocards, Mr. Williams seemed to have grasped the concept very early and he does an excellent job of maintaining the window.

This book is an obvious labor of love with substantive research going into each an every image. No stone is left unturned and one cannot help but appreciate this not only as a beautiful 3D experience but an academic one as well. I'll skip the surface incongruity of a `rock-n-roll god' longing for such a simple and idyllic way of life between these pages. What emerges most is the artistic work of T.R. Williams and his ability to create wonderful 3D images at a time when cameras were unwieldy items and stereo cameras certainly didn't exist. Weather it was remarkable foresight and a need to preserve a way of life in images or just a love of the village life at the time, this photographer has saved a bit of history that we can all admire.

Along with this book comes Brian May's OWL viewer which has a slide focusing adjustment feature. Thoughtfully designed and with a sturdy construction, this is a quality viewer. I was also happy to see that the London Stereoscopic Company is offering these viewers for separate sale at [...]. With an introductory price of £15 plus £11.50 shipping (to US non-European customers), and with an apparent planned hike to £20, they end up being a bit steep in price, but worth it in the long run if not just to have one. In the pantheon of 3D viewer inventors, we have names such as Wheatstone, Holmes, Gruber and now, should we be adding May? Face it, he could have just included a longorette or a Loreo lite viewer, but due to Brian's passion for 3D, he decided this tome deserved its own high quality viewer, and when one wasn't available, he designed his own. How cool is that?

As a historical record and for the high production value, A Village Lost & Found gets 5 stars from me.

"Buddy you're a young man hard man
Shoutin' in the street gonna take on the world some day
You got blood on yo' face
You big disgrace
Wavin' your banner all over the place"

Brian May wrote those lyrics for --- but of course you remember....Queen.

Thirty years ago, the young guitarist and songwriter dropped out of school to see if his college band, Queen, would go anywhere. Did it ever! The group made 15 CDs, sold 300 million copies. Songs like "We Will Rock You" and "Bohemian Rhapsody" brought Queen to the height of British rock --- you won't be mocked if you argue that this was the best English band of all time. And let's not forget Freddie Mercury, the lead singer, lost to AIDs --- and still mourned by millions.

When Queen quieted down, Brian May completed his academic work and earned a PhD. from Imperial College, London. (You can buy his thesis on Interplentary Dust, A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud.) As a mass communicator, he had an interest in a more direct explanation of the way things work, so he co-authored a book, Bang! The Complete History of the Universe.

And now the versatile Dr. May has topped himself --- he's taken a lifelong interest in stereoscopic photography and produced a picture-and-text book that is at once a historical chronicle and a work of art. A Village Lost and Found: Scenes in Our Village comes in a slipcase; in a separate folder, you get a 3-D viewer that May, and his collaborator, Elena Vidal, created for this project.

Where does a fascination like this come from? You guessed it --- May's childhood. As a boy, he liked to let his eyes relax as he looked at the wallpaper in his room; eventually, it moved, popped, acquired dimensionality. Later, a cereal box contained a prize: a 3-D viewer. He started exploring three-dimensional art, making pairs of sketches with the central object of one frame set just slightly off-center. Voila! 3-D!

At college, May was near enough to Christie's to begin to build some expertise. He discovered the work of one "TRW". To his great good fortune, learned that T.W. Williams was perhaps the most poetical photographer if the 1950s. Eventually, he rounded up a vast collection of these nearly forgotten images.

What Williams had done, May realized, was to freeze a small village in a magical moment --- instead of reading about it in a novel by Thomas Hardy, you could almost literally visit it. That is, with the help of a viewer, you could feel yourself in the scene. And what a scene: a rural idyll, five minutes before the train come to town, and mass literacy, and industrialization.

Where was this town? The images provided no clues. So May published a picture of the village church on his website and offered a prize to anyone who could identify it. Thirty-six hours later, he knew--- it was Hinton Waldist in Oxfordshire, the village where Williams had grown up. From there, he was able to document most of the photographs.

The book has about 80 scenes, some in color. Intelligently, the left hand page offers a large single image. On the right, you'll find two panels of that image. Slip the page into the easy-to-assemble stereo viewer, let your eyes relax --- and enter a world that's 150 years old.

Text? Oh, yes, and very helpful. Beyond the description of the scene, there's a poem for each image, presumably written by Williams, that sets a tone. For example:

One other rick and then the task of summer will be done
The farmer then shall count his gains and with the setting sun
The husbandmen at harvest home shall crowd the genial board
And think complacently upon the wealth their hands have stored.

The images are gentle, but compelling. Here is a knife grinder chatting with a woman in the doorway of her cottage. A farmer loads a cart. A potato harvest at Dick Carter's place. Martha and Daniel at the churn. Mrs. Giles at the water pump. Gleaners. Anglers.

He speaks of a "seminal genius" and "fresh launch" for a nearly forgotten artist. Very true. But for the reader/viewer, it's something else, something that a rocker would, however great his erudition, understand --- it's a trip.