Monday, August 3, 2009

Len. Spencer's Lyceum, ad, 1907

Here is an ad for an service bureau that provided an exchange for song slides and music as well as a booking agency for operators and musicians. The name of the agency "Len. Spencer's Lyceum" tells us that it had its origin in the lyceum circuit, which would book entertainments of lectures and other educational programming for theaters. That the agency was now branching out into motion pictures suggests that the lines between entertainments were not firm. Indeed, at the time (1907), lecturers had been regularly featuring motion pictures on their programs for almost a decade, and many moving picture houses featured short illustrated lectures as entr'actes between reels (as an alternative to the illustrated song) and had begun using lecturers to help explain the increasingly complicated stories of the films.

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Source: Moving Picture World 27 July 1907, 330.