A bit of a plug for a journal with which I am involved. There are few scholarly journals out there which concern themselves with early film, which makes Early Popular Visual Culture all the more precious.

It was originally published in 2001 as Living Pictures: The Journal of the Popular and Projected Image before 1914. It reinvented itself as EPVC in 2005, with Routledge as publishers. It is dedicated to publishing research on all forms of popular visual culture before 1930. It takes as its particular brief to

… examine the use and exploitation of popular cultural forms such as (but not limited to) cinema, photography, magic lanterns and music hall within the fields of entertainment, education, science, advertising and the domestic environment; and is primarily concerned with the evolving social, technological and economic contexts which such popular cultural products inhabited and defined.

… which is spreading things as broadly as you could wish. So it’s not just silent movies, but akin popular projected forms, and the world they inhabited, which is demonstrated in the range of essays in the most recent issue (vol. 5 issue 1, April 2007):

• Joe Kember, ‘The Functions of Showmanship in Freak Show and Early Film’
• Paul Myron Hillier, ‘Men and Horses in Motion: Thomas Eakins and Motion Photography
• Gerry Turvey, ‘Ideological Contradictions: The Film Topicals of the British and Colonial Kinemaograph Company’
• John Hewitt, ‘Designing the Poster in England, 1890-1914’
• Eric Faden, ‘Movables, Movies, Mobility: Nineteenth-century Looking and Reading’
• plus an archive feature, introduced by Vanessa Toulmin, ‘Magic Ephemera’ and book reviews.

All that, and it looks great. Get your local library to take our a subscription today!