The last working stereopticon in Kansas: a sourcing story
It began with a letter on library stationery and ended in a barn outside Chanute. In between were forty-one phone calls and a great deal of driving.
The letter came in on a Tuesday in March. Cream-colored library stationery, typed on what was clearly an actual typewriter, from the acting director of a historical society in a town of nine hundred people in southeast Kansas. They had received a bequest of two hundred glass lantern slides from a local estate — travelogues from the 1890s, mostly, plus a set of Holy Land scenes and a curious run of civic parade photographs. What they did not have was a way to show them.
They wanted a projecting stereopticon. Working. Not a reproduction, not a modern LED conversion. The real article.
The obvious calls first
We started where anyone would start. A dealer in Rochester who used to keep three or four of them on hand. Retired. His son, who took over the shop, sold the last one to a museum in Vermont in 2019 and had not seen one since. A collector in Philadelphia who owns what is probably the finest private lantern collection east of Chicago: unwilling to part with any of his, though he was gracious about it and gave us two more names. Both dead ends. One of those names, it turned out, had died in 2022.
By the end of the first week we had a list of forty-one people to call and a folder of email threads that all trailed off with polite regrets.
What we were actually looking for
A projecting stereopticon — as opposed to a hand-held stereoscope, which is the parlor viewer — is a large biunial or triunial magic lantern with two or three lens tubes, typically running on limelight in the nineteenth century and later on incandescent bulbs. The good ones came from McAllister of New York, T. H. McAllister's various successors, Riley Brothers of Bradford, and the Chicago firms. The mahogany-and-brass biunials from the 1880s are what most people picture. They weigh sixty pounds and require a competent operator and a dark room.
The catch is that any surviving working example almost always lives in either a museum or the estate of someone who has just died. There is no active market. There is a rumor of a market, which is different.
The barn
The lead that eventually paid off came from an old friend who runs an auction house in Independence, Missouri, and who happened to mention our search to a picker he uses for rural estate clearances. That picker remembered a farmer outside Chanute — same county as the historical society, as it turned out — whose late father-in-law had been a Methodist circuit preacher in the 1930s and had used a stereopticon for temperance lectures. The equipment was, as far as anyone knew, still in the barn.
We drove down on a Thursday. The barn was a genuine 1910s post-and-beam with pigeons in the rafters and, in a wooden crate under a tarp under a disused seed drill, a McAllister biunial lantern, complete, with its original tin slide carriers and a partial set of chromolithograph slides depicting the evils of drink.
Every good find has a moment where you realize the object has been waiting. This one had been waiting since about 1948.
The condensers were intact. The rack-and-pinion focus mechanisms moved. The brasswork was tarnished to the color of an old penny but the japanning on the sheet-metal body was almost entirely present. The illuminant had been converted at some point from limelight to a large incandescent bulb, which was fine — we would not have wanted to bring live limelight into a historical society meeting room.
Getting it home
The farmer's wife made us coffee. The farmer named a price that was fair to both of us and refused to bargain further, which we respected. We wrapped the lantern in moving blankets, laid it flat in the back of the van, and drove it the eighty miles back to the shop.
Two weeks of workroom time: cleaning, replacing one cracked condenser with a period-correct spare from our own stock, rewiring the lamp housing with modern silicone-insulated leads, testing on a screen at nine feet. It threw a bright, sharp image with the natural warmth that only a real condenser lantern gives you. Modern projectors are more efficient. They do not look like this.
The delivery
We drove it down again in June. The historical society had cleared their meeting room and rigged a screen. About thirty people came, including two who remembered stereopticon shows from their childhoods in the 1940s. The acting director gave a short speech and cried at the end of it, which she apologized for and which none of us minded. The first slide up was a hand-tinted view of Jerusalem in 1892.
A closing note
We do not always find what someone asks us to find. When we do, the object usually turns out to have been sitting quietly somewhere the whole time, which is both the miracle and the ordinary fact of this trade. If you are looking for something particular — even something you are half-sure does not exist anymore — our reference desk answers letters.