HOLLYWOOD IN BRIEF : 3-D HOLLYWOOD, <i> Photographs by Harold Lloyd edited by Suzanne Lloyd Hayes (Simon & Schuster: $35.; 95 pp.)</i>

In 1948, Harold Lloyd received a new Stereo Realist camera, and for the next 20 years seems never to have put it down. A founding member and first president of the Hollywood Stereoscopic Society, Lloyd was a talented, incorrigible shutterbug who earned the nickname “Stop the Car Harry” on family outings.

More than 300,000 stereo views taken by Lloyd have been catalogued, and 67 of them are reproduced here, in full color, from the original Kodachrome slides. The images are chiefly of famous people Lloyd knew--actors, writers and politicians--captured at parties, sporting events, parades, on movie sets or at his 16-acre Beverly Hills estate, Greenacres.

Stereo views, properly mounted and presented, can convince the viewer he is looking not at a picture of a thing but at the thing itself. The images in this book attest to Lloyd’s skill as a stereographer, and it is disappointing to find seven of them reproduced with the left and right images transposed, destroying the stereo effect.

In his 1954 introduction to the “Stereo Realist Manual,” Lloyd wrote: “Of an evening, I can sit, looking into the stereo viewer, as if I were looking out of a window upon the things I have seen, places I have been to; the pleasures, thrills, and experiences of the past are vividly recreated for me.”

Collectors of Hollywoodiana will find this album entertaining and worthwhile, but stereophiles will be left wishing for a more comprehensive survey of the work of a major figure in the history of three-dimensional imaging.