This book reveals some of the exciting inter-relations between Gothic Horror literature, film and magic lantern shows. It is an innovative work, providing new insights into how Gothic Horror as a whole started, with the genesis of the Frankenstein films, and encourages the reader to think of the relations between such books and films as one vibrant set of energies.

It examines the connection between Gothic and film studies and the media. Jones provides a useful referencing tool for academic departments and explores the advent of film in the 1890's and its relation to French Symbolist literature, and the Lumieres Brothers, as well as the link between Schiller, de Sade and Robertson's Fantasmagorie.

This book provides new insights into how Gothic Horror as a whole started, and encourages the reader to think of the relations between such books and films as one vibrant set of energies.

Click cover to open the Blackwell's academic seller page.
Click to open the University of Chicago Press page for this book.

Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print:Belgravia and Sensationalism is a comprehensive study of the whole run of the monthly periodical Belgravia under the direction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

It traces the material history of the magazine, its production and global distribution while at the same time placing its history and content in the context of Victorian popular culture and Victorian discursive formations.

Among the questions Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print investigates are the status of authors in the marketplace, the innovative place Belgravia holds in the history of print culture, the rhetoric of sensationalism in fiction, journalism and pre-cinema, the representation of trade with India, and the use of urban space as a branding strategy.
It makes the claim that the periodical is the sensation novel of the 1860s.

Alberto Gabriele studied Philology and Literary Criticism at the University of Florence, Italy, where he was awarded a laurea with honors. A recipient of a Fulbright fellowship, he holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. from New York University’s Comparative Literature Department. His research interests are the history of the novel, the relation between the written text and visual culture, and the history of film.


Click cover to open the publisher's bookpage.

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This book explores automata or early robots as performers on the stage of theatre history. Automata are precursors to our digital culture, demonstrating that our spectacular culture of machine-based entertainments has numerous historical precedents.

Automata are surprisingly saturated with intellectual and cultural history. Chapters examine topics like English Reformation Iconoclasm's fear that art might surpass God's nature in Elizabethan moving statues; the influence that hydraulic garden automata had on Descartes' mechanical philosophy; automata as ideal objects of the aristocracy in eighteenth-century Europe; theatrical productions focussed on that alluring automaton Olympia; and a case study of R.U.R., the drama that coined the word Robot.

At its heart, this study examines automata as both performative objects of mimesis and metaphors for the period in which they are explored.

KARA REILLY is a Lecturer at the University of Birmingham, UK. She is a theatre historian, theorist and dramaturg. Her work has appeared in New Theatre Quarterly, American Drama, Theatre Journal and Contemporary Theatre Review.

Click cover to open the publisher's bookpage.

Scrapbooks, Snapshots and Memorabilia: Hidden Archives of Performance asks the questions: What constitutes an archive? What is worthy of being archived? And who decides? Performances are ephemeral, so archival questions of selection and appraisal determine which performances will be remembered by history and which will not.

The essays in this collection each explore a different facet of the ephemerality of performance, and the traces it leaves behind: from photographic stills of actors or sets; draft scripts and production notes, theatre programs and reviews; the language used to evoke the experience of watching a dance; to the memories contained within a site which has been used for a site-specific performance.

Each of the contributors to Scrapbooks, Snapshots and Memorabilia employs pertinent case studies to reveal performances that are so often 'hidden' from the authoritative archival view; for example, those by women, indigenous people, amateurs and working people, and those outside metropolitan centres. In this way, they build a powerful argument for reconsidering - or at the very least, broadening - notions of what the performance archive can be.

Click cover to open the publisher's bookpage.

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Very few books on painting can be found on the Early Visual Media pages. Media Archaeology & Visual Media by definition are interdisciplinary fields. The intermedial context, researching 'Naturalist' paintings in relation to photography, theatre and cinema is an interesting approach.

This catalogue and exhibition is a new stage in long and ongoing study on Naturalism powered by Gabriel Weisberg who expands the various intermedial contexts of this second part 19^th. century and early twentieth century genre.

The many illustrations often show rare samples of less known but great works of art in private collections. This, as well as opening the path for further intermedial research, are the main strengths of this great visual source and accompanying exhibition.

Click cover to open the Van Gogh Museum website.

Ich traue meinen Augen nicht

A wonderful catalogue on the history of caricature & the grotesque. Most illustrations comes from the Wener Nekes collection.

.The book traces the origins of the caricature in physiognomy and the subsequent infiltration of the genre in (popular) Art.

The work discusses fundamental questions, what is man? what is art? The images leads us into a world of illusion, distortion, deception, ambiguity, the mystery.

The cartoon as an entertainment medium and his satirical meaning and use in popular printings and publications.

Click cover to open the publisher's bookpage.

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Erkki Huhtamo is Professor of Design | Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles and the author of 'The Roll Medium, The Origins and Development of the Moving Panorama until the 1860s'.
Jussi Parika is Reader at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton, UK) and the author of 'Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses and Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology'.

3D Displays and Spatial Interaction:
Exploring the Science, Art, Evolution and use of 3D Technologies.

Scientific extremely well researched and equally interesting for media scholars in the field of both, historical and the very latest modern new media and it's applications.
One does not need to be a scientist to learn a lot from this enlightening, 419 pages, book with over 244 illustrations, many of them in color.

The book focuses on modern 3D displays and spatial interactions but links contemporary haptic 3D technologies with their historical forerunners such as stereoscopy, Pepper's Ghost & the Fantasmagoria.

'He who does not honour the past is not worthy of the present'.
Everyone involved with old and/or new media should read this most informative source which also deals with the use of new technologies in popular entertainment and virtual reality environments linked with the notion 'Suspension of Disbelief'.

The book reproduce the 'Moisse Fantascope' and explains the 18^th. century Phantasmagoria shows, forerunner of the creation of ethereal images by modern computer applications & interfaces. The historical ethereal image is wonderful illustrated by a smoke projection performed by the late Mike Bartley.

For the first time the book also reproduces an hitherto unknown Phantasmagoria poster recently discovered in the library of the University, Ghent. This Dutch language poster, 1831, annouced a 'Pantasmagoria Ghost Show' in Ghent.

The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi

The son of a deranged Italian immigrant, Joseph Grimaldi (1778–1837) was the most celebrated of English clowns. The first to use white-face make-up and wear outrageous coloured clothes, he transformed the role of the Clown in the pantomime with a look as iconic as Chaplin’s tramp or Tommy Cooper’s magician.

One of the first celebrity comedians, his friends included Lord Byron and the actor Edmund Kean, and his memoirs were edited by the young Charles Dickens.

Drawing on a wealth of source material, Stott has written the definitive biography of Grimaldi and a highly nuanced portrait of Georgian theatre in London.

Click cover to open the publisher's bookpage.

This multidisciplinary exhibition brings together more than 300 works: modern and contemporary art, architecture, films and documents drawn from numerous public and private collections.

Designed as an experience both playful and educational, it offers the first comprehensive exploration of its theme, inviting visitors to think about how the city is imagined and how this imagination finds expression in concrete projects.

World's Fairs, contemporary theme parks, the Las Vegas of the 1950s and '60s, twenty-first-century Dubai : all these have helped bring about a profound transformation in our relation to the world, our conceptions of geography, time and history, our ideas about the original and the reproduction, about art and non-art.

The catalogue reproduce for the first time a 12 meter long part of the unique 'Morieux Paris 1900 World Fair Cyclorama/Panorama'. The total length of the spectacular panorama is almost 50 meters and was painted by an academic painter from Ghent, Léon Van de Voorde, owner of the fairground atraction 'Théâtre Mécanique Morieux'. Follow link for more information.

Click cover to open the Centre Pompidou exhibition page.

Visual Delights II, Exhibition and Reception is an international anthology of papers taken from the successful second Visual Delights conference held at the University of Sheffield in 2002.

It brings together a rich vein of material covering many aspects of popular and visual culture in the late Victorian and early Edwardian period. Interdisciplinary in approach, it includes essays on nineteenth century circus performers, early cinema exhibition practice, ‘penny dreadfuls’, lantern culture, early colour experiments and popular photography.

With essays from internationally renowned historians in the fields of early cinema, art history, performance, photography and theatre studies, it offers a wealth of significant new material and demonstrates a variety of approaches to this rich material.

The book is lavishly illustrated with contemporary photographs, posters, magic lantern slides and engravings and provides a rich visual resource for the further study of nineteenth century visual culture and performance practice.

Click cover for more information.

The History of Television 1880 - 1941

No other technological innovation can be cited whose impact on the fabric of daily living has been as pervasive as that of television. A sole inventor does not exist; television came about through the remarkable interactions of several hundred scientists.

For better or worse, television has been the dominant medium of communication for fifty years. Yet it is a relatively recent invention, one that required passionate inventors, determined businessmen, government regulators, and willing consumers. This volume covers the history of television from nineteenth century European conceptions of transmitting moving images electrically to the death of television as a discrete system in a digital age.

In this fascinating and colorful book, researcher and performer John McCormick focuses on the marionette world of Victorian Britain between its heyday after 1860 and its waning years from 1895 to 1914. Situating the rich and diverse puppet theatre in the context of entertainment culture, he explores both the aesthetics of these dancing dolls and their sociocultural significance in their life and time.

The history of marionette performances is interwoven with live-actor performances and with the entire gamut of annual fairs, portable and permanent theatres, music halls, magic lantern shows, waxworks, panoramas, and sideshows.

McCormick begins his study with an exploration of the Victorian Marionette Theatre in the context of other theatrical events of the day, with proprietors and puppeteers, and with the venues where they performed. He further examines the marionette’s position as an actor not quite human but imitating humans closely enough to be considered empathetic; the ways that physical attributes were created with wood, paint, and cloth; and the dramas and melodramas that the dolls performed.

A discussion of the trick figures and specialized acts that each company possessed, as well as an exploration of the theatre’s staging, lighting, and costuming, follows in later chapters. McCormick concludes with a description of the last days of marionette theatre in the wake of changing audience expectations and the increasing popularity of moving pictures.

Click cover to open the publisher's bookpage.
See more Puppet related Art on Early Visual Media

MAGIC 1400s - 1950s is a great book on the history of Conjuring Arts, Prestidigitaion & Illusions. Great in size, 29 x 44 cm (11.4 x 17.3 in.) with 650 pages but especially great in content, both textual and visual. The book is written by specialists in the field such as practicing conjurors, Ricky Jay & Mike Caveney, both also historians on prestidigitation and legerdemain.

The third author, Jim Steinmeyer, also a practioneer of the art of deception already published many books on conjuring and illusions and created deceptions featured by famous magicians of today such as Doug Henning, David Copperfield, and Siegfried and Roy.

The book celebrates more than 500 years of the dazzling visual culture of the world's greatest magicians. Featuring more than 1000 rarely seen vintage posters, photographs, handbills, and engravings as well as paintings by Hieronymus Bosch and Caravaggio among others.
The book traces the history of magic as a performing art from the 1400s to the 1950s.

Combining sensational images with incisive text, Magic explores the evolution of the magician’s craft, from medieval street performers to the brilliant stage magicians who gave rise to cinematic special effects; from the 19th century's Golden Age of Magic to groundbreaking daredevils like Houdini and the early 20th century's vaudevillians.

Click cover to read more on the Taschen web site or browse virtually through all pages of the book.
See some Magic curiosity's on Early Visual Media.

See more wonderfull books on Magic:
Zauberkünste in Linz und der Welt & Rare Künste.

An easy-to-read reference book on automatic organs offering 512 pages of well researched Chapters and Appendixes + Bibliography and Index.

Chapters:
/ Automatic Pipe Organs & How they work / Mechanical Instruments & Automatic Music in History / Italian Water Gardens & Mediaeval Hydraulic Organs / The Golden Age of Mechanical Music Machines / Clockwork Organs & Musical Clocks / Barrel Organs for both Church & Home / Orchestrions & the Age of Mechanical Creativity / Street Organs & Music for the Masses / Showground & Dancehall Organs / Reed Organs & Portable Organette / Small Domestic Organs & Perforated Paper Music / Concert Instruments & the Reproducing Pipe Organ / Musical Repertoire& the Fidelity of Performance / The Social Impact of the Automatic Organ / Automatic Organs in the 21^st Century / Mechanical Organ Preservation, Conservation & Restoration / Pneumatic Organ Preservation, Conservation & Restoration / Living with the Automatic Organ, Care & Maintenance.

Automatic Organs. can be ordered directly from:
Bushwoods Books

ISBN: 9780764325687
Click cover to open the publishers's bookpage
See more Fairground related Art on Early Visual Media

The Education of the Eye

The University of Westminster has always been at the forefront of technological change in the heart of London, providing educational programmes shaped by the changing needs of the capital. It has also contributed to the social and cultural life of London in some remarkable ways.

When the University’s predecessor, the Polytechnic Institution opened to the public in the newly fashionable Regent Street in August 1838, it was committed to the promotion of science. It achieved this aim by visual means, exploring innovative ways of demonstrating practical science and new technologies to a general audience.

The Royal Polytechnic Institution became a major Victorian tourist attraction. Visitors could be submerged in the diving bell, have their photograph taken in Europe’s first photographic studio, see the new industrial machines in motion, or watch a spectacular lantern show in the Polytechnic Theatre.

The Education of the Eye tells this exciting story for the first time, drawing on an extensive range of primary and secondary sources. In keeping with the Polytechnic's reputation for visual spectacle, it is lavishly illustrated with more than 70 contemporary images, many of which have not been previously published.

Une Image Peut En Cacher Une Autre

Fascinated by optical illusions and curious to explore the limits of the art of painting, these artists have begun a long story of visual puzzles and changing perspectives.

Playing on the ambiguity of double images, the different levels of which depend entirely on the observer's point of view, many painters have tried to create confusion and introduce several meanings, often hidden, in images to be looked at in many different ways.

Apart from Arcimboldo and his famous composite images or reversible portraits, and Dali, that unquestionably great master of ambiguous images, double images have been attributed to chance, and have not been approached as conscious acts on the part of the artists.

That is why the organisers have decided to show in this exhibition "Une image peut en cacher une autre" only the double images that have been consciously included and explained by their creators.

 (Text source)

Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightment.

'Curiosity' and 'wonder' are topics of increasing interest and importance to Renaissance and Enlightenment historians. Conspicuous in a host of disciplines from history of science and technology to history of art, literature, and society, both have assumed a prominent place in studies of the Early Modern period.

This volume brings together an international group of scholars to investigate the various manifestations of, and relationships between, 'curiosity' and 'wonder' from the 16^th to the 18^th centuries. Focused case studies on texts, objects and individuals explore the multifaceted natures of these themes, highlighting the intense fascination and continuing scrutiny to which each has been subjected over three centuries.

From instances of curiosity in New World exploration to the natural wonders of 18th-century Italy, Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment locates its subjects in a broad geographical and disciplinary terrain. Taken together, the essays presented here construct a detailed picture of two complex themes, demonstrating the extent to which both have been transformed and reconstituted, often with dramatic results.

Click on cover for more information or to order this book.

Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction.

Jason Marc Harris's ambitious book argues that the tensions between folk metaphysics and Enlightenment values produce the literary fantastic. Demonstrating that a negotiation with folklore was central to the canon of British literature, he explicates the complicated rhetoric associated with folkloric fiction.

His analysis includes a wide range of writers, including James Barrie, William Carleton, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Sheridan Le Fanu, Neil Gunn, George MacDonald, William Sharp, Robert Louis Stevenson, and James Hogg. These authors, Harris suggests, used folklore to articulate profound cultural ambivalence towards issues of class, domesticity, education, gender, imperialism, nationalism, race, politics, religion, and metaphysics.

Harris's analysis of the function of folk metaphysics in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century narratives reveals the ideological agendas of the appropriation of folklore and the artistic potential of superstition in both folkloric and literary contexts of the supernatural.

Click on cover for more information or to order this book.

See some Folk-Art on Early Visual Media.

The Mass Image, a Social History of Photomechanical Reproduction in Victorian London.


Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936) identified the cultural shift that occurred at the end of the nineteenth century, when photomechanical techniques destabilized existing visual hierarchies and helped initiate the modern media.

The Mass Image provides the first substantial account of the emergence of the photographically reproduced image as it traces the expansion of imagery that transformed the artistic and cultural landscape of the 1890s.

This book looks in detail at the illustrators, photographers, editors, publishers, wood engravers, and reproduction firms who commissioned, originated, and produced images in popular illustrated magazines. The book demonstrates that photomechanical reproduction was central to an explosion of hybrid hand drawn and photographic imagery. These visual fragments provided readers with a meaningful picture of the surfaces of everyday modernity.

Click on cover for more information or to order this catalogue.

'Children and Theatre in Victorian Britain.

The cult of the child performer was a significant emergence of the Victorian age. Nurtured by growing mass media, the commodification of these children extended beyond the stage itself into merchandising and celebrity.

Victorian theatre children found themselves not merely baubles in a spectacle, but essential ingredients of Victorian entertainment. This centre-staging was echoed in the political realm: Lewis Carroll, Augustus Harris and Millicent Fawcett stood at the forefront of a fierce public debate between a Victorian public impassioned by juvenile display and social reformers determined to stamp out exploitation.

This is the first major study of children in Victorian theatre. It exposes contradictions between Victorian conceptions of childhood and fashions in theatrical taste. Forgotten scripts are rediscovered, while new light is shed on familiar texts such as Alice in Wonderland and Pirates of Penzance. At the centre are the child actors, the social, political and artistic context of their working lives, and their developing professionalism.

Click on cover for more information or to order this catalogue.

Conjuring tricks, magic lantern slides, silent movie screen actor, escapism, mediums & spiritism, "this book has it all !!!". Arthur Moses, one of the authorities on the amazing life of Harry Houdini, describes the career of this celebrated magician & escape artist.

Although a trough believer in the afterlife, Houdini spent much of his time in unmasking spiritist mediums, claiming they had access to the world of the deceased. Being a conjuror and illusionist, Houdini was the right man to become an avid 'debunker of spiritualism'.

The book is partly illustrated with a set of magic lantern slides, initially used by Houdini by the aid of a magic lantern, to show audiences different techniques of spiritualist fraudulent techniques.

Houdini soon became worldwide famous as an illusionist and magician but is especially remembered by most people as an escape artist able to free himself from every deprivation of liberty.

Only few men lived such an intriguing live which makes this book an inevitable addition for all libraries of conjurors, pre-cinema collectors, photo & film historians & today's spiritualists. Click on cover for more information or to order this book.

Visit the Conjuring page on Early Visual Media..

William Haggar - Fairground Film maker.
Biography of a Pioneer of the Cinema.

Since most people came in contact with the invention of cinemathography on Fairground, a biography on the life of a Fairground exhibitor offers a wonderful look behind the scenes of these earliest pioneer public filmscreenings.

The author, Peter Yorke, is William Haggar's great-grandson which gives the book an even more greater appeal since the story is based on oral reminiscences, unpublished family memoirs and contemporary press reports.
Read more about the book on the author's website.

This book is a must for all interested in Victorian itinerant theatres, fairground bioscope shows, the films by Haggar himself and popular entertainment at the end of the 19^th. and the dawn of the 20^th. Century in general.

'William Haggar - Fairground Film maker' can be ordered directly from:
Áccent Press Ltd. Click on cover for more information or to order this book.

See also Routledge's Encyclopedia of Early Cinema
Visit another Fairground exhibitor on Early Visual Media.

Technology: Art, Fairground and Theatre.

'Technology: Art, Fairground and Theatre' presents a highly diverse parade of inventions that have influenced our perceptions marches: from the perspective paintings of the Renaissance, continuing with the notorious 'train sicknesses' of the nineteenth century, to the modernday 'helicopter view'.

A constant feature of the sensory transformation through history is instruments and machinery, from the camera obscura, via the stereoscope to the multimedia art of today. And in the same way, an ever-returning question is what these things do to us.

Petran Kockelkoren (1949) holds the chair in Art and Technology at the Department of Philosophy, University of Twente. He also holds a lectorship Art and Technology at ArtEZ, Institute of the Arts. This book is a revised version of Kockelkoren's inaugural oration, published as part of the series 'Fascinations.

'The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded' can be ordered directly from: NAi Publishers
This book is available in English or in Dutch.
Click on cover for more information or to order this book.

Visit the Fairground page on Early Visual Media.

" EXTRAORDINARY EXHIBITIONS: THE WONDERFUL REMAINS OF AN ENORMOUS HEAD, THE WHIMSIPHUSICON & DEATH TO THE SAVAGE UNITARIANS " Rikcky Jay, (°Brooklyn, 1948) 'sleight of hand' Illusionist wrote a book with an extraordinary title and contents. The book is based on 17th., 18th. and 19th. Century playbills from Jay's own collection. This Wonderfull volume with the most suitable and sober layout astonish us through 'sensational, scientific, satisfying, silly and startling attractions' as described on the "The Museum of Jurassic Technology Bookstore" Featured are a ghost showman, a singing mouse, a chess playing automaton, a cannon ball juggler, an African hermaphrodite, a chicken incubating machine, a rabbi with prodigious memory, a ventriloquist, a spirit medium, a glass blower, a woman magician, a speaking machine, a mermaid, a bullet catcher, a flea circus, etc., etc. etc. This Sleight (old word for “cleverness") book is one of the few that 'brings back to life' those itinirent fairground actors and their wondrous acts.

Apart of being one of the world's greatest's sleight-of-hand artists and an expert in the world of fantastic entertainment, Ricky Jay featured in many films directed by David Mamet.

Order this book here or here If you like Early Visual Media, you will love this book

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