Astounding Science Fiction, August 1955 (British Edition) — page 120: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Sie — NI = > 3 LS r Sig tate cs Redes Se orem = tye THE REFERENCE LIBRARY By P. SCHUYLER MILLER S.F. in 3-D. We have stayed away from gimmicks and gadgets in this department, though it would have been easy, while commenting on the upsurge in juvenile science fiction, to talk about the host of space cutouts and push-outs and kits and models which fill the toy stores, inspired more by television than the science fiction we know. 3 However, a gadget which showed up in last week’s mail is irresistible, more for the possibilities it offers than for what it now is. Briefly, View- Master is telling an unimportant little tale about Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, in a series of twenty-one very effective three-dimensional table-top tableaux. Science fiction, even of an elementary kind, has gone 3-D—and the trans- formation works. View-Master—a trade-mark of Sawyer’s, Inc., Portland, Oregon—has come a long way since I bought one for a niece five or six years ago. Slightly different views, one for each eye, are made by a stereo-camera on color film and mounted on a special disk which slips into the viewer. The View- Master library now runs to several hundred scenic views, a number of nature-study reels, and a growing number of story-sequences for children. The first of these used the crudest of models and were pretty terrible, but the new Tom Corbett adventure in twenty-one scenes—he follows the trail of a mysterious pyramid to the Moon and Mars, then to the asteroids—has 118 conicbooks.coun