With the Movie Makers

Boston: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co.. Good. (c.1923). First Edition. Hardcover. (pictorial hard covers; no dust jacket) [a well-worn copy, bumping/fraying at all corners, quite a bit of rubbing to front-cover illustration and spine lettering, general external soiling; the binding is fully intact, however, and the book is internally clean except for a one-time owner's signature on the front pastedown]. (B&W photographic plates) The state of filmmaking in 1923, pitched to a juvenile audience. (It's noted in the Foreword that much of the material in the book had already appeared in article form in the magazine "The American Boy.") From the Foreword: "Motion pictures are still changing so much, in their development from year to year, that any survey of this vast, chaotic new industry is in danger of being out-of-date long before its time. With this in mind, I have attempted to stress those phases of movie-making, and of the story-telilng that underlies each photoplay, that do not change. A generation hence, the fundamental problems confronting the makers -- how to show real people, doing interesting things in interesting places -- will be the same." (He was sure right about the inevitability of such an account's outdatedness, but it hardly took "a generation hence": it would only be five more years before the talkies started to arrive in force. The best things about this book are its illustrations -- 51 photographs, primarily of a behind-the-scene (off-camera) nature -- although it's worth noting that most of the captioning is generic, i.e. individuals and specific films are usually not identified. (The exceptions are shots relating to two Douglas Fairbanks films, ROBIN HOOD and THE THREE MUSKETEERS.) .