The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi: Laughter, Madness and the Story of Britain’s Greatest Comedian, by Andrew McConnell Stott. Canongate, 2009.

As iconic a presence to late-18th and early 19th-century audiences as Charles Chaplin was to those of the early 20th, Joseph Grimaldi was the most celebrated of English clowns. Freedley juror Don B. Wilmeth took special note of author Stott’s degree of “detail devoted to the Georgian theatre as an institution in London,” insight which provided a “wonderful context for Grimaldi’s considerable contributions over such a short lifetime.” In addition to Stott’s scholarship, juror Rob Melton appreciated the physical characteristics of the book itself, noting particularly the “high quality of the paper, font (and) layout.” Melton predicted that Stott’s volume will be “one of those fairly rare books that will find readers in both academic and public libraries.”

The American Play: 1787-2000, by Marc Robinson. Yale University Press, 2009.

Freedley juror Don B. Wilmeth hailed Robinson’s sweeping study as “far more than an overview of American play texts of the past 200-plus years,” citing the work as “the most original and revolutionary assessment of American plays and their context in our generation.”

Film, A Sound Art, by Michel Chion. Translated by Claudia Gorbman. Columbia University Press, 2009.

Spanning the full history of sound’s relationship to cinema, encompassing even the “deaf films” of the silent era, French scholar Chion’s masterful study became available in English in 2009 through Claudia Gorbman’s translation. Wall juror John Calhoun noted that Chion “provides the reader with a fresh way of seeing (and hearing) movies, and does so with cinephilic passion.” Fellow juror Charlotte Cubbage pointed out that Chion’s “multi-level analyses include all aspects of sound within movies and incorporate film theory, the effects of technology, auteur techniques and styles and audience response.” Juror Calhoun added that the preservation of Chion’s “eloquent prose style” in English is “a tribute to translator Claudia Gorbman.”

The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture, by Rob King. University of California Press, 2009.

Wall juror Charlotte Cubbage called King’s work “an in-depth and convincing analysis of the ways the Keystone Film Company reflected major social changes of its era,” noting in particular the author’s “scholarly responses to popular entertainment of the time period.”