Stori-Views Pixie-Viewer

United States, 1950s

The Pixie-Viewer started out as a creatively efficient and novel cardboard box viewer. Reverend Henry G. Kiehl submitted a patent application for this self-contained stereo viewer where the lens and diffuser apertures and the stereoview slot were all part of the bottom portion of the box, making it double as a stereoview container and viewer. He claimed “there has long been a need for a simple box viewer of the inexpensive disposable type, which can be employed for advertising purposes or for general sale.” Interestingly, the 1918 Pan-chro Scope was one of the viewer patents cited in their application. The patent for the cardboard Pixie-Viewer, #2868071, was granted in 1959. Even though the patent was applied for and granted to Henry under Church-Craft Pictures, Inc. in St. Louis, Missouri, the Pixie-Viewer was manufactured under the Stori-Views company name, which was a division of Church-Craft Pictures, Inc. Church-Craft Pictures was the ministry business run by Henry and his son, Reverend Paul Kiehl. They produced lots of educational and religious materials, including films. But they also had the Stori-Views company, which is the better-known name in the 3D market because of the large volume of stereoviews — known as Stori-Views — they produced. Church-Craft Pictures did actually market a 3D viewer under their own name — it was called the Stori-Viewer (confusing, right?). Church-Craft and Stori-Views would eventually both be referred to as divisions of Visual Data Corp, which was another of Henry Kiehl’s companies that would last for many years.

The cardboard Pixie-Viewer evolved into a plastic viewer, as you’ll see below. There were 2 different styles of the plastic version but both continued to mimic a design feature of the earlier cardboard viewer: they had a built-in space for holding cards on top of the viewer. The Stori-Views company would later produce unnamed plastic viewers (see our Stori-Viewer page) that are often confused with official Pixie-Viewers because of their similar size, shape, and colors, but one way to tell them apart: the unnamed plastic viewers from Stori-Views did not have the cardholder feature found on the Pixie-Viewers.

Henry Kiehl mentioned advertising purposes in his patent application for the Pixie-Viewer and they didn’t waste time pursuing that angle with this branded Pixie-Viewer for Wyeth where the Stori-Views have been re-branded as “Clini-Views.”

Eventually, plastic was used for the Pixie-Viewer but still with space on top for holding stereoview cards. This one, in marbled brown, came in a special “look-through” box.

Plastic Pixie-Viewer: Example of Separately Packaged “Pixie-Views”

All the Pixie-Views we’ve seen have been of this size but not all have 2 stereoviews per card — some have just 1.

Plastic Style 1 Pixie-Viewer: 1958 Example of Dealer Advertising

This advertisement, targeted at toy dealers, promotes the new Pixie-Viewer as “profitable” and its peek-through box as “self-merchandising.” We’re skeptical about the claim of “many hours of fun” for kids — over what time period? Days? Weeks?

Just because they switched from cardboard to plastic doesn’t mean they gave up on advertising as a use case for the Pixie-Viewer, as evidenced by this set for Arkansas Traveler Aluminum Boats. The viewer itself is not branded but the box and stereoviews are.

They were able to get Wyeth to sign on once again as an advertiser, this time with their plastic Pixie-Viewer and advertising Cyclamycin and their Advances in Otology.

We have this second style of the plastic Pixie-Viewer in red and turquoise.