Sunday, October 17, 1999
Growing up in 3-D
Since she was 5, View-Master collector has “traveled' in three dimensions
BY MIKE PULFER
The Cincinnati Enquirer
While other kids took their vacations in cars with fins, Mary Ann Sell took hers on View-Master.
“My mother used to take me to the Deer Park branch (Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County) and I would get several View-Master reels on my library card,” she said. “Every week, we would renew the viewer (on loan) and get more reels.”
It all began when Mrs. Sell was 5. Today, she's the 47-year-old vice president (and president-elect) of the National Stereoscopic Association, an organization of more than 4,000 people who collect and trade and chat about their View-Masters and reels.
In their Hyde Park house, Mrs. Sell and her husband, Wolfgang, have devoted three rooms to their collection of 40,000 reels, 500 viewers and dozens of viewers and cameras.
Over at his nearby auto-parts business (Saybrook Imports), they run the Oliver Wendell Holmes Stereoscopic Research Library for three-dimensional image products. (Mr. Holmes invented the modern stereoscope.)
View-Master reels are circular cards about 5 inches in diameter with transparencies mounted along the circumference. When viewed through a hand-held View-Master, which rotates the card with the press of a lever, they produce an image that looks 3-D.
“At 5, I didn't understand the technicalities of stereo lenses,” Mrs. Sell says. “I just knew they were the best pictures I had ever seen.”
Eventually, she came to understand and appreciate the system — invented in 1939 — that combined one image for the left eye and another for the right in “an optical-illusion type of thing.”
Anyway, “That was my summer. That was my travel,” Mrs. Sell says.
National parks (and scenic attractions that later became national parks) were fascinating to see. Niagara Falls, Carlsbad Caverns, the World's Fair.
By the time she was 10, she had her very own View-Master and started her own collection of reels.
“It was the early '80s when I got really serious,” she says.
Today, she stalks her collectibles in newspapers, on Internet markets and at antique shows, flea markets, garage sales and camera shops.
“We travel all over and do lots of searches,” she said. “I'm not a dealer — only a collector. I only deal when I have to buy in group lots.”
She says she has some duplicates in her collection, but not many. Imperfections won't do.
“If they're dirty or missing a window, or rain damaged, I don't want them,” she said. “They're very sensitive to heat, water, temperature, all that.”
Values range from 25 cents to $300 for reels and from $2 to $5 for viewers, she said. One of her favorites: “My first Roy Rogers reel,” bought at a Tristate flea market.
The value of her collection is estimated at tens of thousands of dollars.
Mr. and Mrs. Sell have written several articles for various antique- and toy-collector magazines and a book, View-Master Viewers, an Illustrated History (3-D Book Productions, the Netherlands).
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