In my lifetime I’ve bought a quarter of a million magic lantern slides. When I write that down, it sounds absurd. I need to find a different way of looking at it. It’s forty years of active collecting, so that’s an average of 6,000 a year or 100 a week. Nope, still sounds ridiculous.
Like all collectors, you start off buying anything that’s related to your field and then, as the years pass, you become more selective. Unfortunately, to obtain the few items that you really want, you still have to buy large quantities as, before Ebay (where you can buy one slide at a time), that’s how they came ….. in collections, from Grandad’s attic or shed, auctions, Church Hall’s and some other very strange places.
Obviously I haven’t kept all of them, therein would lie madness, but as well as those with artistic or photographic merit which I added to my archive, there were a few that defied categorisation. Today’s slide is one of them.
You might wonder what possible use I would have for it. In my magic lantern shows, I usually included a ‘caption competition’, where I would show pictures on the screen and ask the audience to put a captions to them. It’s a very effective way of encouraging audience participation and can be hilarious.
So, today, I present this little bit of silliness. We know he’s called Joey but what is he saying? Keep it clean please! I’ll give you my suggestion in my next post.
If you found this interesting, please share it with your family and friends. If you’re not reading it on my ‘Magic Lantern World‘ website, then please visit. There are over one hundred illustrated articles about Victorian slide projection and links to my historical photo-booklets on Amazon, my Ebay shop for magic lantern slides and Etsy store for historical photo greetings cards with a twist. You can read about my authentic Victorian magic lantern shows and talks on ‘Optical entertainments before the movies’ and lots more!
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