Price £15.00 (£10.00 to MLS members)
Richard Crangle and Robert Macdonald (compilers), The Illustrated Bamforth Slide Catalogue
London: Magic Lantern Society, 2009
ISBN 978-0-9510441-8-6
5,000+ pages, 4,000+ illustrations, DVD-ROM, 13.5 x 19cm
The Bamforth Company of Holmfirth, Yorkshire (better known as a major producer of sentimental and comic ‘seaside’ postcards throughout the 20th century), made hand-coloured photographic slides on a commercial scale from the mid-1880s until the start of the First World War.
This DVD-ROM presents the first illustrated catalogue of the Company’s entire lantern slide production, including:
• a full listing of all 1,400 Bamforth slide sets known to have existed, with dates, lists of individual slides and other supporting details
• over 4,000 images of slides (about 20% of Bamforth’s entire output)
• copies of around 600 readings, songs and other texts that accompanied the slides
• details of the people, companies and other organisations responsible for producing and distributing all this material
• a fully illustrated booklet giving the background to the Bamforth Company and the history of photographic slides.
The slide images, drawn from private and public collections through the support of members of the Magic Lantern Society, cover the whole range of Bamforth’s 30-year output: songs, hymns, stories, recitations, religious services, lectures and comic subjects.
Subjects include moralistic poems by George Sims, Victorian and Edwardian popular songs, social history in the form of temperance poems and services, rare WW1 propaganda cartoons by the Bamforth House artist Douglas Tempest, and even a promotional song for the Titanic disaster relief fund.
The DVD should be compatible with any computer having a DVD drive and a standards-based Internet browser. For Windows PCs we recommend Internet Explorer 6 (or higher) or Mozilla Firefox 2 (or higher). For Apple Macs we recommend Safari. The disc may work with other Internet browsers such as AOL, but this cannot be guaranteed.