The Bioscope has just received its 20,000th visit! It’s been just under eight months in existence, and took the first five to reach the 10,000 mark, so we’re on the up-and-up. Thank you to everyone who reads the outpourings, and do keep on sending me ideas, news and comments.

I thought that to mark the occasion I should point out some of the past posts which have useful reference information, and which have got buried now in the achives, as not everyone may be aware of them:

By far and away the most visited post on The Bioscope has been Searching for Albert Kahn. This is a guide to Autochromes (colour photographs) and the collection of Albert Kahn which featured in the BBC4 series The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn.

There are two posts on the digitisation of newspaper collections worldwide which have materials of value for the study of silent film, Times Past and More Times Past.

There is the eight-part series extracted from a 1912 guide, How to Run a Picture Theatre. Look out for other such series in the future.

There’s the two-part guide to the huge collection of downloadable newsreels, non-fiction and fiction films to be found on the British Pathe site, in British Pathe – part one (the fiction) and British Pathe – part two (the rest). Look out also for Movietone and Henderson, another freely-available newsreel collection – although Movietone was a sound newsreel, the site has a significant early film presence through the remarkable Henderson collection.

There’s a guide to good books on silent cinema, in A Good Read or Two; and a guide to Researching patents, demonstrating what can be found online for free.

Then there are some of my favourite posts: The Silent Worker, on silent films and the deaf; the spectacular Hollywood stage production of Julius Caesar in 1916, described in Shakespeare in the Canyon; the several posts on digitised books such as the 1917 National Council of Public Morals report The Cinema, the Paul McCartney video which uses the Pepper’s Ghost trick, explained in It’s all done with mirrors (well, glass actually); the intrepid war reporter Jessica Borthwick, in A Girl Cinematographer at the Balkan War; thoughts on Martin Scorsese’s wish to save lost films, in Nine out of Ten; discussions of optics coming out of Simon Ing’s book The Eye, in Land and Kinemacolor (the colour experimenter Edwin Land, that is) and The Persistence of Vision; the story of James Joyce’s brief career as a cinema manager, in Visiting the Volta; and the unlikely Croydon pioneer of film achiving, Louis Stanley Jast, whose work is described in Croydon and film archives and The camera as historian.

Plus there’s the Library, FAQs, the latest information on upcoming conferences and festivals, and a Calendar of events. And there are lots of new ideas lined up for the future.