Product Description
Synopsis
As Per Title - See Also Attached Sheet For 300 years, the magic lantern - ancestor of today's film, slide, video and data projectors - enchanted, entertained and educated millions throughout the world. For its sixth book, The Magic Lantern Society is to publish an Encyclopaedia on this much neglected medium of art and instruction. This ambitious project will include accurate information on all technical aspects of the lantern, biographies of lantern inventors and showmen and details of manufacturers and distributors of both hardware and software. It is anticipated that there will be towards 1000 entries with 500 illustrations, the book running to 360 pages. Though by necessity Eurocentric, (research in much of the world is only just starting to be undertaken), the entries do give a sense of the international use of optical projection, from the early Phantasmagoria showmen who 'raised ghosts' in Germany, France, Britain and the USA in the 1790s and 1800s, to amusing accounts of the rough reception given to travelling lanternists in out-of-the-way Australian towns in the 1860s. Technical entries explain Argand lamps and triunials, chromatropes and limelight burners, panoramic slides and the Lantern Wheel of Life. Important figures included range from Robertson to Muybridge, and dozens of virtually unknown names are 'brought to life'. Organisations covered include the famous Royal Polytechnic (home of the lantern in England for 50 years), the Band of Hope and the Salvation Army.
