New York's Printing House Square

I collect architectural and street views of New York City, and one of the more unusual places of the late 19th C was Printing House Square, near City Hall. It was the site of the major newspapers and the typefoundries.A statue of Benjamin Franklin was erected in 1872, and book was printed to commemorate that event. From Bigmore and Wyman, A Bibliography of Printing, v.1 p.168:

"Printing-house Square, in the centre of New York, is the head of the newspaper industry of that city. It is surrounded by the palatial offices of some of the morning, and several of the weekly journals. It was thought appropriate that in the centre of the square there should be erected a statue of Benjamin Franklin, America's famous patriot-printer, and a wealthy citizen, Mr. Albert De Groot, came forward and defrayed the expense of the erection. The monument was inaugurated amid great rejoicings, and in the presence of some of hte most eminent citizens, the proceedings throughout on the most hearty and interesting character. Among those who took a prominent part in the affair was Mr. De Vinne...."

Oliver Wendell Holmes and Stereoviewing

Holmes-style stereoviewer (Image via Wikipedia)

The history of 3-D from stereoscope to : The New Yorker

The New Yorker has an interesting piece on the development of 3-D stereoscopy, really a review notice of Ray Zone's book Stereoscopic Cinema and the Origins of the 3-D Film, 1838-1952, and really a book about movies. I find some of it a bit breathless about Avatar. (Oy!) 

But there's this bit on Oliver Wendell Holmes and the 19th C stereoscope (stereoviewer):

He [Holmes] was not the inventor of the stereoscope; that honor belongs to Charles Wheatstone, a British scientist who had built a more cumbersome device twenty years earlier. But Holmes’s lighter version sold en masse, and, in an even more fervid article from 1861, he guided stereoscopists on a grand verbal tour of the world, and promised them a trance—“a dream-like exaltation of the faculties, a kind of clairvoyance, in which we seem to leave the body behind us and sail away into one strange scene after another.”

I've written more on stereoviews and my collecting here. (Below: Images of New York from my collection.)

 

Victorian Rhapsody

Brian May of the band Queen has collected old stereoviews of a Victorian country town. The Daily Mail ran an article about his collecting and his new book, A Village Lost and Found (written with Elena Vidal). British stereoviews, hand tinted. These are attractive set scenes of mid-19th C country life, and are shown as halves--the originals would have two images pasted to a card which, when viewed in a stereographoscope, would produce a 3-d image (in "stereo"). The fact that a musician for Queen also collects these views and then happened to live in the house of the photographer, whose descendant visited him, is wonderful beyond words!

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1243604/Victorian-Rhapsody-Queen-guitarist-Brian-May-photos-forgotten-Britain-secret-obsession.html#ixzz0dgfvSupd

A phots from the original article, after the jump.