An Optical Toy Chest

Abstract

I once visited the home of two kaleidoscopecollecting sisters, and spent the morning looking through a wide range of scopes: kaleidoscopes, artisanmade and factoryissued; kaleidoscopes, telescopicantique and modern electronic; kaleidoscopes in miniature, small enough to hang on a necklace; and one enormous kaleidoscope that would not fit anywhere indoors. It was a dizzying, kaleidoscopic array of kaleidoscopes, a wild range of fractured and symmetrized images— a psychedelic Wunderkammer. This experience came to mind when reading Meredith Bak’s Playful Visions: Optical Toys and the Emergence of Children’s Media Culture, which is also something of a Wunderkammer— or better, perhaps, a toy chest. An optical toy chest. In it, beyond the kaleidoscope, we find jigsaw puzzles, rebuses, spinning tops, stereoscopes, thaumatropes, zoetropes, and beyond. Each of these artifacts receives due attention, and along the way, Bak untangles the famously elaborate mockGreek naming conventions of optical toys, as well as the who’swho of the devices’ makers— all those Bradleys and Brewsters, Parises and Plateaus whose names swirl alongside the arcane lexicon of the objects. Playful Visions is topnotch media history, bringing to vivid life those strange objects one may only distantly remember from screenings of Werner Nekes’s Film before Film (1986). Patrick Ellis