Short­ly after the suc­cess of the ‘Véras­cope’ stereo­scop­ic cam­era, Jules Richard and his engi­neer Louis Colardeau patent­ed the first mod­el as ‘Stéréo-Classeur’ in 1899 and start­ed pro­duc­tion in the same year. It was renamed as ‘Le Tax­iphote’ in 1900 and remained in pro­duc­tion for around 40 years.
All mod­els were avail­able in two stan­dard ver­sions, one in waxed wal­nut and one in pol­ished mahogany. There were also deluxe ver­sions with chang­ing designs such as inlaid pat­terns of dif­fer­ent woods or addi­tion­al ornaments.
The view­er illus­trat­ed has an inter­nal addi­tion to the mech­a­nism that was patent­ed in 1907. Nor­mal­ly, when chang­ing the slides, you can see the image mov­ing ver­ti­cal­ly. This view­er has instead a black cov­er which quick­ly tilts down before the cur­rent slide starts mov­ing down and remains there until the next slide is in view­ing posi­tion. This vari­a­tion is rarely seen and is no big advan­tage to the view­ing expe­ri­ence — if not in use for projection.
There is anoth­er rea­son for this assump­tion. Nor­mal­ly, the small­er lever on the left allows the slide title to be read. How­ev­er, this was mod­i­fied here, whether by Richard or lat­er remains unclear. It now tilts down a black mask­ing frame with a bor­der made of semi trans­par­ent paper. This frame is out of focus and there­fore adds a kind of blur­ry vignette to the stereo image, which is dis­turb­ing in nor­mal use, but may be a nice effect for a pro­ject­ed image.
Maybe research on the Dutch Deal­er Guy de Coral & Co, who sold this view­er, could pro­vide fur­ther information.