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Two years after he co-wrote a scientific history of the universe, Queen guitarist Brian May is returning to publishing with a book on photography.
Frances Lincoln will be publishing Scenes in Our Village, a book on stereo-scopic photography, in hardback on 8th October, priced £25. This particular branch of photography was a way of creating a three-dimensional image from a pair of photographs.
May’s book, which is co-written with Elena Vidal, is a painstaking excavation of stereo photographs from the dawn of photography, recalling life in an Oxfordshire village of the 1850s. At the book’s heart is a reproduction of T R Williams’ 1856 series of stereo photographs.
May said: “I’m going hell for leather trying to meet the deadline for the book. This has been a passion of mine for most of my life really, certainly for the past 30 years.
“Nobody has ever seen the complete series for the last 100 years. I spent years tracking them down—there are 59 of them, and they happen to represent a significant first in photography, being the first time there was a narrative series of photographs. They represent a disappearing way, and philosophy, of life.”
The book comes with a stereoscope designed by May so that readers can appreciate the pictures. “I keep shocking Frances Lincoln because it is fairly demanding what I am asking it to do,” he added.
The guitarist’s previous forays into publishing were Bang!, a popular science title co-written with Sir Patrick Moore and Chris Lintott (Carlton) and his PhD thesis A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud (Springer-Zerlag).