Gray (Rev. James Comper)
LANTERN READINGS. CENTRAL AFRICA
Published: London, No date (1876)
Stock Number: #5622/1
Price: R1,500
paginated 92 - 124, 8vo (210 x 140 mm), original cream paper upper cover, titled within a decorative border, neatly restored and laid onto matching paper with a new back cover, text is slightly soiled and has been folded lengthwise.
A list of the 51 slides in the set is provided and these dwell on providing scenes of African people and places surrounding the life, explorations and death of Dr Livingstone. The date is uncertain but the entry for slide 50 mentions Stanley as having returned to Liverpool 'on 2nd of April, this year, 1876'. The tenor of the entry for Slide 34. African Customs (Zulu War Exercises) suggests that it predates the Zulu War of 1879. A page of 'Preliminary hints to Amateur Lecturers' gives detailed instruction on how the show should be presented and it seems often two projectors were used, 'It usually takes about a quarter of a minute to "dissolve" one view into the next and hence, to mark the place at which the reader should strike his bell, there will be found the letter 'B' enclosed in brackets sufficiently near the close of the "reading" on each view to admit of the reading on to the next view being proceeded with, without the awkward pauses that so often spoils the smoothness of the whole entertainment'. Novel at the time, such lantern lectures were important in shaping the Victorian view of Africa.