
- TitleRichard Balzer Pre-Cinema Collection, 1700 - 1900 (bulk)
- Collector
- Date(s)Circa 1700 - 1900 (bulk)
- Summary
The Richard Balzer Pre-Cinema Collection spans roughly 300 years of optical devices and illusions that explore illumination, projection and persistence of vision. It is one of the most comprehensive collections documenting optics and pre-cinema and includes anamorphoses, metamorphics, hand shadows, dioramas and panoramas, peep shows and much more.
Material housed in Graphic Arts, Photographs and Special Collections includes thousands of individual items, encompassing both textual documentation of pre-cinema optical devices and illusions as well as illustrated works. Forms of material include advertisements, broadsides, correspondence, ephemera, glass slides and negatives, postcards, printed material, programs, puzzles, tickets, and more. In addition, there are optical toys, including handmade flipbooks, and cylinders, discs, and other objects that were used in the optical devices.
The collection of rare books and publications, housed in the library’s Technical Services Department, includes a wide variety of the most important works on optics and perspective covering 400 hundred years of research from the early 17th to early 21st century. There are more than 600 monographic publications that encompass scholarship on optically illustrated illusions as well as hundreds of periodicals, catalogs and pamphlets, and a large selection of pop-up books. - BiographyRichard Balzer was the second of three siblings who grew up in Great Neck, NY and was a graduate of Cornell University and Yale University Law School. Throughout his life, Balzer was a photographer, civil rights activist and social justice advocate. An ardent fan of the Boston Red Sox, Balzer attended a magic lantern show in 1976 and went onto become one of the two leading academic/enthusiasts in the field. He was the Chairman of The Magic Lantern Society of the US and Canada from 1984 to 1989. In 1998, Balzer published Peepshows: A Visual History and made his collection accessible through a website which is archived and available below.
- External link(s)
- Subjects
- Acquisitions InformationGift of Patricia Bellinger, 2019.
- Preferred citationRichard Balzer Pre-Cinema Collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
- DepartmentLibrary
- 2731
- AvailabilityFor information on the contents and availability of this collection please contact the Reference and Public Services department at ref@oscars.org.
- Moving Image Items
- Library Holdings