Nocturnal Entertainment

Just a source of light projected through one lens set toward the blank screen is enough. Along the way, the light passes through a glass plate, bright as a multi-faceted jewel, painted with scenes of daily life, funny or dramatic imagery of a dull daily routine transfigured in a illuminated shape. Alternatively, fantastic scenes of shipwrecks, ghosts, the hell itself full of demons and damned designed in the most gaudy colors possible, in its most aberrant forms. The magic lantern show, available today only through recreations in certain artistic performances or evoked in the narratives of authors like Balzac, in the Swedenborg's visionary theological philosophy and in the patient conceptual reconstruction carried out by historians as Laurent Mannoni, was the imaginary basis of these narratives, glass plates molded from the life and work of unique authors on the fringes of the usual canonization processes that make the Culture something predictable and perhaps unfair.

Such nightly shows were translated into book form by the patient editorial work of Dan Ghetu and by careful revision of the original material by the extraordinary Damian Murphy. In its final form, this show of lights and shadows became something else, a spellbook as imaginary as the phantasmagoria catalog used by Christiaan Huygens to impress some impertinent friends with his latest invention, the magic lantern. With the difference that Lanterns of the Old Night is real.

The photos below were kindly provided by Dan Ghetu. The book starts delivered tomorrow, June 7, 2016.