24. Keystone—Slides in Every School 2017-06-14T11:37:43+00:00

24. Venues

Keystone View Co.-Slides in Every School

The Keystone View Company, one of the largest lantern slide distributors in the U.S., specialized in sets of lantern slides for very targeted venues, the schools.  Most notable was the “600 Set”—600 images of America and the world.

Keystone began in 1892 when photographer B. L. Singley used a “Free of Charge” flyer to build a stock of images to be displayed the next year at the 1893 World’s Fair.  By 1922, Keystone boasted that every school district in a city with a population of over 50,000 had the Keystone System (slides and stereo cards) for each one of its schools. Thus Keystone slides were explaining the world to between three and six million children a year.

Most of its slides were in the less-expensive, black-and-white format, but Keystone also produced color versions. Each slide came with an explanatory card so that students could read about the image.

Archival Notes
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