A Village Lost and Found: "Scenes in Our Village" by T. R. Williams. An Annotated Tour of the 1850s Series of Stereo Photographs

What a beautiful book. I have a particular interest as my mother (who worked in the photography industry) and her parents grew up in the the village. (Both married in the church.) I spent a lot of time myself there as a child. Not only is this a wonderful collection of memories it also shows what a clever man T.R Williams was with his stereoscopic photos.Absolutely beautifully presented with the main book and a separate stereoscope in a presentation box. The stereoscope is easy to assemble and enables the viewer to see the images the way T.R Williams intended. Perfect book for lovers of photography and village history.Nothing short of a masterpiece. Thank you Brian May and Elena Vidal. This is my mother encapsulated in a book.

This book is completely charming. If you want to be taken back to a simpler, slower time, then make 30 minutes for yourself, pour a cup of tea and maybe get a plate of hob nobs and spend some time just perusing this book. You will be completely transported by the colour 3D images of an old village in Victorian England, At first you will be taken in by the wonderful images, but before long you are wondering about these people you are looking at; their lives, their jobs, their daily routines, dreams and families.....it really is that kid of book. It will take you to another place completely. An absolute delight.

Humankind's fascination with 3-D vision goes back a very long way, with Italian treatises identifying clear understanding of its principles as early as the 16th century. The first conceptualisation of an apparatus (which its inventor, Sir Charles Wheatstone called a "stereoscope") designed to reproduce that effect - using drawings - dates to the 1830s, prior to the official announcement of the discovery of photography. But it was photography that made it possible to produce real 3-D images, thanks to Brewster's binocular camera a decade later. It was a phenomenon that caught the nation's and indeed the world's imagination to a quite extraordinary extent. It was used with both the daguerreotype and calotype processes, but it was only with the invention of the albumen process that mass reproduction of images became possible and financially accessible to the public at large.T.R. Williams learnt his craft at the feet of one of the greats of early portrait photography, A. Claudet, in London, but soon set up his own studios, and was soon popular with Queen Victoria herself.Brian May, the polymath Queen singer, had long tried to track down the location, thought by some to be a composite contruct, of the images in this collection, stated to be a Berkshire village. But it was only very recently that an Italian net surfer correctly identified the village as a real one, Hinton Waldrist, in present-day Oxfordshire, but which used to be in Berkshire. With the help of photo-historian Elena Vidal, May has produced a sumptuous book that brilliantly recreates the magic of these exquisitely composed images, and brings a 'lost' village back to life, both in historical terms and in terms of its perception of itself today. The copies are high quality ('though to my eye lack the real crispness for which Williams's work was known), and it takes only a very little effort to see them in 3-D even without the rather flimsy spectacles provided.As Avatar, Alice and other 3-D films reawaken public interest in "seeing in depth", this gorgeous book is a timely reminder of the artistic and photo-journalistic vision and technical brilliance of our Victorian forebears, and confirms that there really is very little new under the sun!

The book is superb and I cannot really add to what has already been said.Within days, I also tried making my own stereo photographs using a standard digital SLR camera, and following the method described in the book. Amazingly, it worked first time, with only minimal effort required in printing the photos side-by-side onto A4 photo paper in the correct size for viewing with the excellent viewer provided with the book. I'm hooked !A word of warning on the packaging, however. I order a huge amount of items from Amazon and their packaging is almost always faultless. However this item is large and heavy and, though packed in a sturdy box, the protection/filling inside the box was insufficient to stop the book moving about and consequently getting battered in the process. The book was replaced promptly by Amazon (March 2010) but, in using exactly the same packaging method, the replacement was also damaged, though less so. I therefore decided to cut my losses because of the bargain price. If you like such a beautiful presentation to be pristine (as I do with any item), then please bear this in mind.

Everything Brian May does exudes style and excellence, and this book is no exception. I know nothing of Victorian stereo photography, but " A Village Lost and Found" had me enthralled. The beautiful binding and slipcase and the high quality viewer are an absolute delight.I admit that when I first tried the 3-D viewer, I didn't "get it", and was quite disappointed. I attributed my difficulty to my astigmatism. But I discovered that the way to view these pictures is with the book stood flat on a bright window sill. Looking through the viewer, and moving one's head around very slightly, gradually the images resolve themselves into glorious 3-D, and you can then explore the scenes which are brought to life. It's a wonderful experience.Top marks indeed!

An absolutely splendid book. The 3D-viewer works admirably and is well constructed. The only (minimal) drawback is the unwieldy nature of having to put the book to the viewer, or vice versa, but this is a minor reservation. The whole thing is well presented and beautifully produced. It is fascinating on so many levels and I strongly recommend it as, even if you only have the vaguest interest, it will bring delight as it transports you one and a half centuries back in time.

I love it. The images are wonderfully reproduced, and thetext is informative. The viewing device is quite easy to use once you get fix the "how to" in your head.Well bound and boxed. Altogether a good purchase.