With The Camera Lucida, You, Too, Can Be an Artist

So read the advertisements on the back pages of my comic books from the 1960s. The ads showed a person seated at a drawing table, looking through an odd prismatic device at a sheet of paper upon which he was, apparently, drawing. Dashed lines from his eyes proceeded down to the sketch on the table, but another line was reflected from the prism and traveled horizontally over to the subject of the drawing—a scantily clad woman. The ad suggested that the mysterious device somehow projected an image of the subject down onto the paper, so that all you had to do was trace the outlines to produce a photographically perfect Work of Art.