Price £20.00 (£15.00 to MLS members)
Stephen Herbert, Theodore Brown’s Magic Pictures: the Art and Inventions of a Multi-Media Pioneer
London: The Projection Box, 1997
ISBN 978-0952394-14-3
136 pages, 197 illustrations, hardback, 21.5 x 26.5cm
From the 1890s to the 1930s, optical experimenter Theodore Brown of Salisbury, England, developed ingenious devices in the fields of the Magic Lantern, stereoscopic photography and 3-D movies.
As the first editor of the Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly he enthused about Kinemacolor and was himself responsible for the Scala Theatre’s version of Kinoplastikon — coloured, singing, pseudo-stereoscopic motion pictures shown in London before Charlie Chaplin made his first film.
For 30 years, Brown sought to develop a viable system of 3-D films that needed no special projection device or viewing aids. He was also patentee of numerous optical novelties including a successful series of children’s pop-up books, unusual jigsaw puzzles and several publications featuring red-and-green moving pictures.
This book brings Theodore Brown and his work out from the shadows of early film history. As an inventor, he pursued his own eccentric obsessions which will delight the general reader as well as collectors of the ephemera of optical entertainments.