THE MEANS FOR THE PRODUCTION AND 
         DISTRIBUTION OF THE   
           "ACCURSED BOOKS", 
     19th-CENTURY POOR MAN'S PORN  
                     
              Part XVIII  
                     
 In this Appendix the reader will find 
 some examples of the images adorning 
    the pages of the accursed books 
distributed at the great industrial and 
   colonial expositions of the 19th 
               Century.  
                     
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  Other examples can be found in the 
Tesseract Museum and the Portfolio of 
  Shameless Images in this same CD.  
        A number of samples of   
"micro" porn photography have also been 
            included here.  
                     
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  Early progress in the techniques of 
 photography developed the ability to 
 reproduce a miniaturized copy, either 
    by hand or through printing,   
   of a normal photographic image.   
The reduction in size is so great that 
the resulting miniature is invisible to 
            the naked eye.  
                     
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   In order to look at one of these 
microscopic mini-slides, a small viewer 
  is needed which magnifies the image.  
                     
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 In the 1800s these micropornographic 
viewers were made by splitting a glass 
sphere in half to form a crude lens. An 
imperceptibly small, round and obscene 
slide was then glued to the base of the 
 lens through which it became visible. 
                    
                     
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The magnifying half-sphere was usually 
 set in a commonplace object such as a 
      pen, a charm or a key-ring. 
                     
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  The same sort of device was used to 
 view the "Santini" (mini-Saints), the 
 name given to the minuscule religious 
 apparitions which, like their obscene 
   counterparts, could be viewed by 
  looking through the lens towards a  
           source of light. 
                     
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  This process was called stenopity  
  after Stenope, the inventor of the 
industrial process for the fabrication 
   of the spheres from molten glass.  
                     
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 Micro-porn must be counted among the 
most curious and original inventions in 
    the History of Sexual Imagery.  
                     
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  The obscene micro-viewers, like the 
analogous sacred ones, were produced in 
    Rome. Thus, once again, the two 
 thousand-year-old themes of pictorial 
representation encounter each other in 
 the very same city where their common 
    origins had been understood and 
      contemplated by the Church.