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Re: Lantern Slides



DO YOU SEE WHAT I SEE?

Early last fall I was looking for literature on lantern slides.  I asked
Richard Pearce-Moses.  He suggested Robert Spindler's "Windows on the
American Past: Lantern Slides as Historic Evidence," VISUAL RESOURCES, V
1-15, 1988.  That's a good overview of the origins and historical uses of
lantern slides, but what I'd like to see is a guide to commercially produced
slide sets.  Where are the catalogs of the many companies that produced
these slides for schools and museums?  Eastman House? Smithsonian's NMAH? I
presume that thousands of sets of natural history or art and architecture
slides were produced,  for example.  I further presume that hundreds of more
or less complete sets still exist, many in the hands of private collectors,
and  that dozens have been cataloged to some extent in museums and
historical societies.

I've seen slides (and mounted photographs) of this sort all across the
country.  Some of them are quite strikingly beautiful, and document
landscapes or buildings much changed or no longer extant. As things are,
there's no easy way of knowing if the University of X has the only surviving
set of "Architectural Wonders of Warsaw" or "The Scenic Susquehanna."  On
what basis, historically, have we made accessioning or deaccessioning
decisions about these slides?  How useful it would be to have a reference
guide to the known output of the commercial lantern slide producers.  One
could then, upon being presented with a potential donation of Tewkesbury's
"Yosemite" or finding a drawer of Thomson's "China," know something of how
common or rare it was thought to be, and maybe whom to query for details
about what we keep or where to offer things we want to get rid of.  Oh, yes,
one can do this last piecemeal here on A&A, or on Photohist.  Is that,
though, sufficient?

Live from a relatively new job in Moscow,

Michael "Do You Hear What I Hear?" Tarabulski

***************************************
Michael A. Tarabulski
International Jazz Collections
Lionel Hampton Center
University of Idaho
Moscow, ID 83844-4247
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