Customer Reviews

A Village Lost and Found

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Length:: 2:51 Mins

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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.

I was crazy about this book, as I love 3D pictures, and with this book, you get the OWL to look at all the wonderful pictures done by TR Williams.
Thanks to Brian May for inventing this "modern day" stereo-viewer..that folds flat, but especially to Elena Vidal and Brian May for bringing back
this wonderful hobby! (Remember Viewmaster")?
I had my whole family taking part in this book, and enjoying the "olden days"!

I only found this book because I was flipping thu the tv channels and saw Brian May (from Queen) was being interviewed. To my complete surprise he wrote a beautiful book. I bought it for myself but am getting a copy for my best friend and daughter too. Who knew some aging rock star had such literary talent. Breathtaking. I highly recommend it.

I've been waiting for this book for sometime, being a Queen fan, I had heard about this project awhile ago, and then just waited. Brian May has a previously published book called BANG! co authored w/ Sir Christopher Lintott which I also enjoyed, as much for the brilliant photography as the informative text.
Like BANG! this is a high quality publication, a hard slipcase with a beautiful book and the well thought out and crafted OWL viewer which makes the photos truly come alive, I got this as a holiday gift to myself and am just so pleased with it. As an added plus, Brian's instuctions on the method of shooting a 3D photo were easy and informative, and something that I'll try myself soon. If you have an interest in stereoscopic photography or rural Victorian England I'd highly recommend this book.

Great book, excellent printing and packaging. Amazing 3D viewer useful for many other images beside the ones in the book. If you like 3D and a bit of history, this is a wonderful book.

Given as a gift. Recipients raved about this item. They were fascinated with the narrative about the 1850s English village, the 1850s technology and the application of that old technology by the current author.

I ordered this book for several reasons, but mostly because I read all about the search for this "lost" village a while ago on Brian May's website.

Brian May (yes, the guitarist from Queen) had seen the series of stereophotographs by T.R. WIlliams, which were taken in the 1850's, but were only titled, "Scenes from Our Village". After searching and researching, he and his co-author Elena Vidal not only located the village, but also some of the structures from the images that are still standing today.

Stereo images, if you are not familiar, are a pair of images of the same subject, taken at slightly different angles so that when viewed together, they create a 3-D effect similar to what we enjoy in computer-generated movies like Avatar and Toy Story 3. The same effect is also used in the 3-D pictures that you stare at until a hidden image appears within it. But these photos were taken over 100 years ago using glass plates in tripod cameras, and were originally viewed as photo pairs mounted ona card, using a hand-held viewer that was the forerunner of our View-Masters of the 1960's.

This book is a compilation of the stereo image pairs from the series "Scenes from Our Village", along with a brief history and explanation of each image - who is in it, where it was taken, comments on the imaging techniques. Most fascinating is the amount of skill required to take duplicate still photos of people and children and nature using the methods of the day which required the subjects to remain in the same position for 5-10 minutes while the exposures were made. A stereo viewer that was included with the book allows easy viewing of stereo pairs as 3-D images, giving incredible depth and life to photos from 150 years ago when photography was in its infancy.

The book also includes a brief history of the photographer, an in-depth description of the techniques and equipment used to create these 3-D image pairs, and a glossary of the photographic and imaging terms to help those unfamiliar with the topics and wonderful insights into the life and times in this village that was lost and found. Stereo images of the existing structures, sometimes from the same viewpoint as in the original photos, are also included.

If you have any interest in photography, or of 3-D effects, or of the history of rural village life in the 1850's, this book is highly recommended.

I had the great pleasure of attending a book signing event where these authors discussed all that went into the making of this book, and more tidbits of information about the images, which made looking through the book again even more enjoyable.

I must say this is a superb book. Look to the video review by Christoph64 for an overview of what this book is all about. This is a volume for those interested in photography, specifically stereoscopic photography, as well as for those interested and studying how people lived in 19th century Britain - with a focus on common village folk. The viewer which comes with the boxed book works well, though not as well as with my early 20th century viewer. I suggest, for those scenes which have special appeal and for personal use only, to have a print shop copy those particular scenes on card stock, and then cut them to size so they fit in an old-fashioned viewer. You will be amazed at what you will immediately see and how the scene pops to life.
I want to thank Brian May and Elena Vidal for working on and producing such a fine volume so that many around the world can enjoy these examples of life in Victorian Britain. It truly looks to be a labor of love. It strikes me that this book would be a good introduction for children, as well as adults, to learn about life in another place and time. Incidentally, many of the views show hand-colored examples of this early photography. This is an example of how publishers can still produce books of a fine quality at what I think is a reasonable price.