1941. 8vo, pp. [2] blank, 36, [2] blank; pp. 3-34 anaglyph plates printed in red and green for 3-D viewing together; minor edge-wear to final leaf, aside from some very light browning, clean and bright; with two pairs of 3-D glasses housed within a printed pocket on inside front cover; in the original cloth backed orange printed boards, head and tail of spine a little worn, ink stain to rear cover, with further light soiling to boards, extremities a little rubbed and worn; a good copy. First edition of this striking optical work, and one of a number of innovative educational textbooks by Rudolf Pruner that incorporated stereoscopic anaglyphs, used here by Pruner to help secondary school pupils visualise and understand complex geometrical figures more easily.
The introductory preface by the educationalist Dr. Josef Klíma, cites the influential work of Henry Vuibert (1847-1945), who had published ‘Les Anaglyphes Geometriques’ in 1912, as well as the 1938 work ‘Mathematische Raumbiler’ by the publishing firm Köhler-Graf-Cavlov. He believes, however, that Pruner’s work is one of the first published specifically as an educational text book for school students. ‘Let these images not only enliven, but also facilitate the study of descriptive geometry’ (p. 2, google translation).
An anaglyph consists of two differently filtered coloured images, one for each eye, and drawn in chromatically opposite colours (usually red and cyan). When viewed through the stereoscopic glasses, the picture revealed is an amalgamation of the two images, and gives the impression of a black figure in three dimensions. Two early proponents in France were Josepeh d’Almeida (1822-1880), and Louis Ducos du Hauron (1837-1920) who produced the first printed anaglyphs in 1891.