Before the Movies

American Magic Lantern Entertainment and the Nation's First Great Screen Artist, Joseph Boggs Beale

Terry Borton, Debbie Borton

• Publisher: John Libbey Publishing
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• eBook ISBN:
  9780861969999
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Chapter 1: The Magic Lantern
• Chapter 2: Provenance, Attribution, Dating – An Introduction to Beale’s Catalogue Raisonné
• Chapter 3: The Larger Context of Beale’s Work
• Chapter 4: Other American Magic-Lantern Artists
• Chapter 5: Assessing the Screen Art of Joseph Boggs Beale
• Appendix 1: Notes to The Condensed Catalogue Raisonné of Beale’s Magic-Lantern Slides
• Appendix 2: Chronological List of Beale Sets and Groups
• Appendix 3: Slides Possibly by Beale
• Appendix 4: Lantern Slide Companies Distributing Beale Slides
• Appendix 5: The Beale Method for Dating Catalogs
• Appendix 6: Illustrated Song Slides Containing Beale Images
• Appendix 7: List of Books Illustrated by Beale
• Appendix 8: Selected Bibliography
• Index