BORTON, Deborah and Terry | Before the Movies

Before the Movies: American Magic-Lantern Entertainment & the Nation’s First Great Screen Artist, Joseph Boggs Beale. New Barnet, England: John Libbey Publishing, 2014.

4to.; 200 pages; 300 color photographs; pale pink endpapers; black glossy illustrated boards lettered in white. No dust jacket, as issued.

First edition. Signed by the authors on the half-title.

Before the Movies is the first book about American screen entertainment in the pre-movie era. A groundbreaking study, lavishly illustrated with 330 color pictures, it is a comprehensive survey of the American artists who created early magic-lantern stories and songs for the screen. The book emphasizes the work of Joseph Boggs Beale, a pioneer in the field and demonstrates that Beale almost single-handedly created American-made screen entertainment for the generation before the movies. His lifetime output was 2,073 images in 258 sets―the screen-time equivalent of 14 full-length films―which millions enjoyed every year. The provenance, attribution, and dates of Beale's lantern slides are discussed in detail, and a comprehensive catalog of his lantern images makes Before the Movies an essential reference volume.