If These Shirts Could Talk: The Tantalizing Tales Behind Used Clothes
Jockeying for Position: How Boxers and Briefs Got Into Men's Pants
Gloriously Grotesque 19th-Century Pipes
In the Hot Seat: Is Your Antique Windsor a Fake?
Love at First Kite: How Pizza and Pente Led to One Oklahoman's High-Flying Obsession
Blood, Sweat, and Steel: My Afternoon with the Ace of Swords
'The Great Gatsby' Still Gets Flappers Wrong
Say Ahhh: An Oral Surgeon's Quest to Reimagine the Garage-Band Guitar
Forget TV Pickers, Meet the Real Mavericks of the Antiques World
Coveting The Craziest Cat-People Collectibles
The Richard Balzer Collection
The magic lantern section of The Richard Balzer Collection covers the machines, images, and cultural artifacts related to these 17th-century precursors to slide projectors. In addition to stereopticons, pamphengos, and biunial and triunial lanterns, Balzer has collected everything from hand fans and figurines to thimbles and tiles, as long as they depict magic lanterns or the people who traveled from town to town with the devices on their back in pursuit of their next paying audience on them. The pages devoted to magic lantern slides are particularly good, offering images of phantasmagoria (dancing skeletons, anyone?) and a Flash gallery showing, for example, a lighthouse whose surrounding scenery transitions from day to night.
