The Spy Camera: The Minox Story
TLDR: “Strange, but comprehensive”
This is an odd little book. It’s the history of a tiny camera – the Minox – that appears in a lot of spy movies. This is the little camera that someone would use to photograph documents – they trigger the shutter by squeezing it from both sides.
I don’t know why someone would write this, other than a pure love for the device. It’s quite comprehensive. Turns out it was invented by a guy in Latvia in the 1930s, and was manufactured at least through the 1990s.
The company never had any comment on its product being used for espionage. They marketed the device as a “subminature” camera, and spent a lot of research making it as small as possible. The smallest model was about the size of a cigarette lighter. And remember, this was film camera. It had a moving shutter, and a film cartridge.
I went out on eBay and found that you can buy them as collectors’ items for about $200, though I think the film must be hard to find because most of them say “untested.”
I will admit to skimming quite a bit of this book. In some ways, it’s almost a photo album – there are pages and pages of schematics and design diagrams and advertisements, etc. And a lot of the technical details went way over my head. To totally understand the book, you need a working knowledge of how a film camera operates.
A big chunk of the book is an appendix-like section which is a detailed listing and description of every model and variant of the Minox ever produced.
The book is a really comprehensive history of a quirky device that most people have never heard of. I’m glad someone wrote it, and I enjoy it as a fan of spy films, but I’m not quite sure what the demand was for it.
Book Data
- Author
- Morris Moses
- Year
- Pages
- 196
- Acquired
- Not recorded
- Open Library
- OL3791655W
- I have read this book. According to my records, I completed it on .
- A hardcover copy of this book is currently in my home library.