Magic lantern shows, in which live performers build stories around projected images, were a once-popular, now-half-forgotten precursor to modern movies. In Magic Lantern Art: The American Screen's First Great Narrative Artist, Joseph Boggs Beale, Terry Borton—himself a revivalist magic-lantern showman—offers a richly researched, copiously illustrated study of Beale, one of the 19th century's most prolific painters of lantern slides.
The earliest lantern shows date to the 17th century, but Beale lived at a time when technological innovations were transforming the craft. Notably, mass production meant slides could be reproduced and sold to lanternists around the country. One image might be seen simultaneously in countless venues: theaters, churches, Masonic lodges, even insane asylums.
