A friend of mine has been working for quite a number of years on making a film based on the diaries of a deaf-mute Scotsman called James Duthie, who cycled to the Arctic Circle in the 1950s. (Obscure? Y'think?)
He's just rung me to ask what camera Duthie might have been referring to when he wrote: "I tried to conceive of a picture through one of the camera's two glasses."
It sounds to me like a TLR, and that he's referring to one of the lenses on the front. To put it in a bit of context, Matt (the film-maker) reckons there's a strong possibility that Duthie didn't really know how the camera worked and was trying to sound rather more knowledgeable than he actually was by talking of "one of the two glasses" - and that he didn't realise both lenses were required.
Although Duthie was very much on a budget, he knew how to save up for things, so he wouldn't have had a top-of-the-range camera but it probably wasn't the absolute cheapest, either. He lived near Fraserburgh in northeast Scotland so probably would have had to travel to Aberdeen to buy it.
What do you lot reckon? Does it sound like a TLR to you? And if so, what make/model would fit into the late 1940s/early 1950s time-frame?
It doesn't need to be 100% accurate as Matt's films don't exactly follow a narrative format, but something that's roughly in the ballpark would be useful.
If you'd like to find out more about the film, which is called Dummy Jim, and you have a bit of time to spare, allow yourself to be distracted for a while by the gorgeous website:
http://www.dummyjim.com
