Before the Movies

"The historians Terry and Deborah Borton devote their days to studying the Philadelphia artist Joseph Boggs Beale, who designed glass slides for magic lantern projectors from the 1880s to the 1910s. Beale filled his skies with swooping angels, and in his foregrounds he sketched rats leaping off precipices. His works presaged the transporting power of cinema. . . Hardly any other academic works have touched on the subject.12/18/14"—New York Times, Art & Design
"No serious film or movie history holding should be without Before the Movies!"—Midwest Book Review
"Before the Movies is highly recommended, not only for the curious and scholarly, but for those who wish to transform their preconception of on-screen entertainment and art."—ARLIS/NA
"Before the Movies can and should serve as a template for future reference works on pre-cinema entertainment. Its structure and design – as well as its rigour in terms of research – provides a highly appropriate model for much-needed reference works on the illustrated song slide, stereo views, and other nineteenth- and early twentieth-century media."—Early Popular Visual Culture
"Beale had a marvelous talent for color and depth of field, and even his scenes of nature bristle with energy and movement. . . . [A]s late as the 1970s American teachers were loading slide projectors with Beale's images.Jan. 2015"—Harper's
"This meticulously researched book means nothing less than the resurrection of a once-popular art form. It is indispensable for anyone who wants to understand the origins of today's media culture."—Erkki Huhtamo, editor of Media Archaeology and author of Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panor
"Before the Movies is not only a superbly researched and illustrated in-depth study of Joseph Boggs Beale, it is also the first balanced history of early magic lantern entertainment in the United States."—David Francis, Emeritus Chief of the Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division of the Library of Co
"Before the Movies is an invaluable resource—a brilliant, ground-breaking study of Joseph Boggs Beale's work. Beale is a figure of the utmost importance, and this desperately needed study is long overdue."—Charles Musser, author of The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1900