Beginnings of the Biograph: The Story of the Invention of the Mutoscope and the Biograph and Their Supplying Camera

New York: The Beginnings of the American Film. Near Fine. 1964. First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [nice copy, as new, no discernible wear, gilt lettering on spine and front cover slightly dulled but still easily readable]. (B&W photographs) This slight volume (78 pages) is a remarkable work of scholarship which should be part of any serious library on early cinema history. As in his other works (among them "The Edison Motion Picture Myth" and "The Kinetoscope"), the author brought a professional historian's discipline and reliance on original sources to a field which prior to that time had consisted almost entirely of anecdotal histories and self-serving memoirs, riddled with distortions and inaccuracies which went unchallenged, and were woven into the fabric of future "histories." This volume begins in late 1894, and chronicles the contact between W.K.L. Dickson (unsung hero of Edison's "invention" of the motion picture) and Harry Marvin, Elias Koopman and Herman Casler, the result of which was the development of a camera and projector that (due to its significant variations from the Edison model) became the foundation for Edison's primary rival in the motion picture field, The American Mutoscope and Biograph Company -- eventually known colloquially as simply "Biograph" -- which, among its other distinctions, would ultimately become the launching pad for D.W. Griffith's directorial career. . (Inventory #: 26488)