I set the smaller item down on a nearby display table and carefully removed the bubble wrap. Nestled within was a round metal canister. I carefully picked it up. There was weight to it.
“You know,” Max said, around the tearing of wooden planks. “If we go through all this and it’s some fugly television from the 1950s….”
I stared at the canister for another moment. “Not a television,” I murmured.
“What?” Max tore off another piece of wood.
“It’s not a TV,” I said again, turning to look at him.
He glanced at the crate and motioned to the item within. “It’s hard to see through the wrapping, but it looks like one of those with the built-in cabinet.”
I walked back to the crate, reached inside, and yanked away the padding. “This is—” I caught myself from finishing, almost like I didn’t want to jinx it. I tore out layer after layer of careful packaging, revealing a spectacularly well-preserved cabinet. “Jesus Christ,” I swore.
“What is it?”
“A Kinetoscope.”
“A what-o-scope?”
“Kinetoscope. A one-person movie viewer, patented by Thomas Edison,” I said, looking at Max. “This was before they’d figured out how to project a moving image to a large audience.” I leaned into the crate and pointed. “See here, you look through the peephole on top. There’s a bulb inside that backlights the frames, and the film is spooled through the cabinet.”
“It’s original?” Max asked.
I rubbed my bristly chin and stared hard. “I think so. Help me pull it out. And for the love of God—”
“Be careful,” Max finished for me.
“The Kinetoscope wasn’t around very long,” I said as we walked the cabinet out of the crate. “As the film industry grew, inventions became obsolete fairly quickly.”
“How did these work, though?” Max asked. “I mean, people didn’t have them in homes, right?”
“Oh no. You’d go to a Kinetoscope parlor. There used to be one here in New York, you know. Taking inflation into account, Edison was charging the parlors somewhere around six hundred dollars for the reel of film.”
“Hell of a businessman.” Max began picking up the mess once we’d gotten the Kinetoscope situated in an empty space of showroom floor. “What was in the little package?”
“A film reel,” I said, hands on my hips as I made a slow circuit around the case.
“Really?” he asked excitedly.
“Niche market makes this difficult to price. It’d be the historical value—”
“Seb. Home movie. Focus.”
I glanced up. “What about it?”
Max made exaggerated gestures at where I’d left the canister. “Let’s see what’s on it.”
I dropped my hands from my hips and went to the table. “I doubt it’s in any sort of salvageable condition.”
“Why do you say that?” he asked, going to the register counter and retrieving a pair of cloth gloves.
“Films simply weren’t well preserved back then. Acid ate away at the celluloid. Sometimes there were studio fires, or old reels were just destroyed. They had no intrinsic value at the time,” I explained.
Max offered the gloves as he joined me.
I put them on. “This would have also been before silent film stars like Charlie Chaplin or Harold Lloyd began protecting their work.” I picked up the canister again and held it close, studying the front and back side.
Max leaned against the table and crossed his arms lightly. “I remember watchingFred Ott’s Sneezein my Film History class. That was Edison’s, wasn’t it?”
