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.The rest is HERE. Also contains videos and 3-D slides.
When Queen quieted down, Brian May completed his academic work and earned a PhD from Imperial College, London. (You can buy his thesis on Interplanetary 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. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here.]
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!
And so it goes.
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Those things were the precursors of the ViewMaster, one of my very favorite toys as a child. I think I still have it in a box in the attic.
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