This lil guy is an Ansco No. 2A Buster Brown box camera. The Ansco corporation was located in Binghamton, NY (not all that far from Eastman Kodak, in Rochester!) and basically just made knockoff Kodaks. Some were quite nice little cameras, but pretty much all of them were fairly close copies of the consumer-model Kodaks.
This one, the Buster Brown, was a clone of the Brownie. Both were named for currently-popular cartoons. I put up some sample panels of Buster Brown, which I must say doesn't translate all that well to the modern aesthetic. I'm particularly fond of his unnerving dead-eyed stare. His sense of humor was pretty dumb too, which tells you a lot about how what we expect from our entertainment has changed.
Identifying this camera was tricky, as there are absolutely no markings on the exterior of the camera. Apparently this one's leather handle must be a replacement, as it would have identified the camera but the one it currently possesses has no markings on it. I had to pull out the film insert, in the process discovering that the entire interior of the camera is made of wood painted matte black, and that it has a spool still inside. It takes "6A or 6B Film", which I think is the same as Kodak's 116.
Clearly it's a pretty early model; later on, everybody stamped their brand all over the place, but this early it wasn't anywhere on the body of the camera. The 2 series was made from 1910 through about 1924.
This one, on the inside, has a few dates-- it mentions patents. June 23, 1903, Sept 20 1910, and May 30 1916. The Buster Brown model specifically (I identified this one primarily by the folding D handle on the film winder) was made from 1916-1920 or so.
So, a pretty early box camera-- one of the pioneers of consumer photography for the everyman.
Here's a link to a PDF of this camera's manual, which is charmingly typeset in the typical fashion. Note how slow the film speeds were, how long the exposures had to be, and how much math they expected the average person to do in order to take a picture!
