QUEEN guitarist Brian May and co-author Elena Vidal will both be signing copies of their book A Village Lost & Found at Peter Jones in Sloane Square on November 5th from 1 - 3pm. Click here for more info.

Mercedes-Benz UK has issued an exclusive interview with May, in which he discusses A Village Lost And Found, published by Francis Lincoln Limited. The following is an excerpt from the interview:

Q: Most people know you as a musician first and foremost, and some may have picked up the fact that you’re an astronomer as well, but is stereo viewing a hidden passion?

A: "It’s been a passion for a very long time - I obviously have too many passions in my life! Ever since I collected the 3-D cards in Weetabix packets, from the age of 10, I have been enchanted by stereo images. It has been a great passion for most of my life, and I’ve always wondered why everybody isn’t as excited about it as I am!"

Q: So why launch the book now?

A: "It’s just when it was finished! There’s no other reason – we certainly weren’t trying to time it with anything else. It took us about three years to produce the book, but really the research goes back a lot longer, a lot further back than that – and I’ve been involved with searching for T. R. Williams material for at least 30 years. We seem to have, by pure chance, hit a real renaissance time in 3D anyway; all these 3D films are coming out, and 3D television as well, so it’s very much on everybody’s lips, and we’re very fortunate to be part of the new rush of enthusiasm for stereo images."

Q: Do you think technology’s taken a leap forward which is why all these films are coming out? Things have moved on from those old red and green lenses.

A: "Well, it’s not red and green any more, but the technology was pretty far advanced in the nineteen fifties with cross-Polaroid viewing spectacles. The House of Wax horror film was very high-tech, and I’m sure it would stand up to most modern 3D movies if it were put into theatres now. There’s real magic in stereo; it’s definitely a different experience looking at a stereo photograph from a mono photograph, and once people get bitten [by stereo photography] they don’t get unbitten. It stays with you for life, I think!"

Q: What was the stereo image in that Weetabix box that got you hooked?

A: "It was a wild animal. There was a series of wild animals – a lion and a tiger and hippos and things. I still have them somewhere, well-photographed, but quite crudely reproduced. When you looked into the viewer you could see all the dots [from the mass-printing process] of the screen and that’s something we’ve been wrestling with, with our book. We’ve really made a big effort to do something very difficult, which is to produce pictures in the book that are of high-enough quality to stand up under magnification. I think we succeeded. We did roll the boat out on the quality of the new book, and it’s been a long long labour of love really."

Read the full interview at this location.

A description of A Village Lost And Found reads:

Based on 30 years of research, Brian May's painstaking excavation of exquisite stereo photographs from the dawn of photography transports readers to the lost world of an Oxfordshire village of the 1850s. At the book's heart is a reproduction of T. R. Williams' 1856 series of stereo photographs, Scenes In Our Village. Using the viewer supplied with this book, the reader can become absorbed in a village idyll of the early Victorian era: the subjects seem to be on the point of suddenly bursting back into life and continuing with their daily rounds. The book is also something of a detective story, as the village itself was only identified in 2003 as Hinton Waldrist in Oxfordshire, and the authors' research constantly reveals further clues about the society of those distant times, historic photographic techniques, and the life of the enigmatic Williams himself, who appears, Hitchcock-like, from time to time in his own photographs.