Mr. Mcintyre, and my Starlab friends across the pond whose name
escapes me (please forgive a name-dyslexic old man) - I just got the
toy of my dreams. A friend of mine who is an inveterate garage-saler
and auction visitor (come to think of it, the one who gave me the
Stylophone recently) gave me another marvelous piece that he stumbled
across. I am now the exceptionally delighted owner of a pristine
Spitz Junior Home Planetarium in absolutely perfect condition, with
box, packing, and manuals intact. I can't believe my luck!
For those of you not in the planetarium field(!) the Spitz Junior was
manufactured from about 1954 until the middle 60's by the Harmonic
Reed Corporation who you may remember for their reed-based but
appearance-accurate musical toys - saxophones, trumpets, trombones,
accordions, harmonicas - all things reed. They obtained permission
and the cooperation of Spitz, Inc., a respected manufacturer of
professional planetarium projectors and designed a very high-quality
educational toy for the home market to take advantage of the
burgeoning interest in space and space exploration. A photo and
better description and history is available at
http://www.pielock.com/nova.htm for those interested.