The Motion Picture Chums Visit the “Art Journal” A Prolegomenon to all Future Studies of Moving Pictures as Revealed in Early-20th-Century Juvenile Literature

Abstract

In 1912 Grosset and Dunlap published Tom Swift and His Wizard Camera, by Victor Appleton, the pseudonymous author of all the books in the Tom Swift series and at least two other series of juvenile books commissioned by the Stratemeyer Syndicate. In that adventure, the redoubtable Tom invented “a new kind of moving picture camera. A small light one—worked by electricity—a regular wizard camera” (p. 10). Working with James Period, who identified himself as “the biggest moving picture man in the world—not in size, but in business” (p. 9), Tom toured the world in his airship and filmed some of the more exotic aspects of nature. These included an elephant stampede, a fight between lions, an avalanche, a jungle fire, a volcano, and an earthquake.