Magic Lanterns

One of  the John Johnson Collection volunteers (Ian Matzen) is cataloguing early Cinema at the moment and has blogged about lantern slides of Robinson Crusoe, and another (Kevin Varty) is an magic lanternist who has drawn to my attention excellent resources in the subject.

The Magic Lantern Society website can only be fully used by members, but has a lot of freely-accessible information on its website, including the history of magic lanterns,  lists of slide readings (the readings themselves can be seen by members) and publications on magic lanterns.

“© The Magic Lantern Society 2007. All rights reserved

The Lucerna site (a collaborative site hosted by the University of Trier) includes 'details of slide sets, slide images, readings and other texts related to slide sets, lantern hardware, people and organisations involved in lantern history, and much more.'  The site is read-only but encourages participation for which a log-in is needed.

Searching can be restricted to results with images, and to country, manufacturer, characters in title, subject, type of image, format, production process, stockist, series title, keyword, date, etc.  A typical record will be divided into two tabs: Set details (with an impressive number of links to related resources) and Slide listing.

By no means all sets have images, but many do and provide a fascinating insight into the realm of the magic lantern lecture.

(C) Lucerna