They have names like The Infernal Cavalry, Satan the Journalist and Bicycle Race in Hell, and tell horrible stories of oppression, torture and misery.
There are also scenes that show the damned playing billiards at “Cafe Chez Satan”, a fancy dress carnival with the Prince of Darkness as an untrustworthy nurse, and a “lottery in hell” for which there is only one winner.
The scenes are all from 19th-century French stereoscopic photography cards called Diableries that have been slowly and passionately collected by the Queen guitarist and badger campaigner Brian May.
For nearly 30 years, May has attempted to collect all 182 cards. He nearly made it in 2013, publishing a lavish book with his fellow obsessives Denis Pellerin and Paula Fleming that featured 180 of the cards. This week the book will be republished with a crucial update: the missing two cards.
“We are overjoyed,” said May. “I don’t think we ever thought we’d get to this point, we thought it was a goner. I didn’t imagine we’d find the missing cards because we had already been looking for 30 years.
“The fact that the book was out there made all the difference, suddenly everyone was on the trail. We created detectives all round the world and that’s the reason these cards eventually turned up.”
The cards were part of the huge craze for stereoscopyin the mid-1800s, when the Diableries were produced over a 20-year period.
The cards are dark and devilish but also very funny, said May. “There is a wonder and magic about them. They are really and truly stereoscopic gems and the more you handle them the more astonishing they become.”
Often the cards are satirising the French authorities or threats from emerging technology. For example, one of the newly discovered cards, Satan’s Train Connection, shows a horrible railway accident.
The final card – the last piece in the jigsaw puzzle – is called La Cuve, or The Vat, and features devils crushing grapes with their hooved feet in an enormous wooden vat.
Some of the cards seem to suggest it is possible to have fun in the underworld with scenes of ice skating and swimming. “I think it must have been comforting for people to see people in hell enjoying themselves,” said May.
Thousands of the cards would have been produced and they were something of an underground phenomenon on both sides of the Channel.
Few survived, said May. “They are so delicate … You’ve only got to put your finger through them once and they’re dead.”
The Diableries are part of May’s wider passion for all things stereoscopic. The enthusiasm has led him to create the world’s largest collection of stereo cards, with over 100,000 in his archive.
A free one-day Diableries exhibition will be staged on Monday – in time for Halloween – at the Century Club in Soho, London – “a gothic Victorian crypt of temptation and seduction” – from 11am-5pm. It also marks the launch of the updated book.
