I saw my first diablerie at a Portobello Market where I was shopping for antiques, about 20 years after falling in love with the Weetabix gifts. Why don’t people do this the whole time? Why do people even bother with flat pictures when they can have 3D pictures?Īnd the diablerie scenes presumably lend themselves quite well to 3D? But once you sent away for your little 1s and 6d stereoscope to put your card in, it jumped into life – it became a window you felt you could walk through.

Anyway, they gave away little stereo cards, little 3D cards of animations and cars and boats and I was just entranced because the cards looked very ordinary – just two little flat images on them. It was great for kids: you never knew what was going to turn up in your cereal bowl. They used to give away great stuff in cereal packets – I don’t know why they don’t do it nowadays. Yes it was! It started out with Weetabix packets. Is this fascination with stereoscopy something that began in childhood? The three authors are due to give a talk at the British Library on 30 October, where they will sign copies of the book. As a consequence, May, who has held a lifelong passion for stereoscopic imagery, has set about designing his own 3D viewer - a pair of plastic spectacles known as the OWL – a pair are given away with the book. These stereo cards are best viewed in 3D. The monster hardback tome collects together a series of diableries ('devilments') – photographs of ghoulish 'stereo' cards featuring devils, skeletons and satrys, originally printed in France in the 1860s. For his latest project, Queen guitarist, astrophysicist and friend of the badgers Brian May has teamed up with two photographic historians Denis Pellerin and Paula Fleming to author a new book, Diableries: Stereoscopic Adventures in Hell.

Diableries by Brian May