SPECIAL PHASES 295STEREO BOOK ILLUSTRATION
With all of the superiority of stereo in mind, one wonders why
it has not been more widely used for book illustration. The an-
swer is that a book should be a unit, and it is difficult to provide
viewing facilities while keeping the book a single unit. Of course
the free vision method as used in Dr. Lemon’s book is excellent
provided the reader can be persuaded to learn to see the pictures.
Otherwise some kind of viewer must be incorporated in the book
itself.
Back during the period when Dr. Holmes was designing his ver-
sion of the stereoscope, some ingenuous individual patented a
book, the cover of which incorporated a stereoscope. From that
time on such patents crop up continually, but never were brought
into practical production until 1937 when Farrar and Rinehart
brought out two volumes intended for children. These failed for
several reasons. The built in viewer was mechanically clever but
optically atrocious and was a severe eye-twister. Then the authors
insisted upon factual reproduction rather than illustrations of pic-
torial value (the writer has reason to know as he was commissioned
to produce these pictures under the direction of the authors).
Finally the halftone screen broke up the tone so badly that the
pictures were almost meaningless. The idea was excellent, but the
embodiment very poor.
Not many years later, the first truly successful stereo book pub-
lishing began. This publishing is being done by Sawyer’s Inc., the
makers of the popular Viewmaster stereoscope and Personal
camera.
The first “book” was a tiny volume about three inches square
which was sold with a halfdozen or so reels illustrating the flowers
of our western mountains. Then came a more ambitious project,
a full sized, but thin volume illustrating the cacti of the U. S. This
set was so successful that a still more ambitious project was started.
This time the subject was mushrooms and was published in two
large octavo volumes. The text is contained in one volume of more
than 600 pages while the other is a dummy book which contains
a Viewmaster stereoscope together with a small album of 33 reels
making a total of 23 1 stereoscopic kodachrome pictures. This pub-
lication is illustrated on page 49.