John Banvard (1815 - 1891) was a famous American painter. He is best known for his panoramic views of the Mississippi River Valley. The description of his panorama was first published in 1847.

“Hearteningly strange . . . Collins exhumes little-known figures [and] recounts their perversely inspiring battles against the more logical ways of the world.” —The Onion Here are thirteen unforgettable portraits of forgotten people: men and women who might have claimed their share of renown but who, whether from ill timing, skullduggery, monomania, the tinge of madness, or plain bad luck—or perhaps some combination of them all—leapt straight from life into thankless obscurity. Collins brings them back to glorious life. John Banvard was an artist whose colossal panoramic canvasses (one behemoth depiction of the entire eastern shore of the Mississippi River was simply known as “The Three Mile Painting”) made him the richest and most famous artist of his day . . . before he decided to go head to head with P. T. Barnum. René Blondot was a distinguished French physicist whose celebrated discovery of a new form of radiation, called the N-Ray, went terribly awry. At the tender age of seventeen, William Henry Ireland signed “William Shakespeare” to a book and launched a short but meteoric career as a forger of undiscovered works by the Bard—until he pushed his luck too far. Collins’ love for what he calls the “forgotten ephemera of genius” give his portraits of these figures and the other ten men and women in Banvard’s Folly sympathetic depth and poignant relevance. Their effect is not to make us sneer or revel in schadenfreude; here are no cautionary tales. Rather, here are brief introductions—acts of excavation and reclamation—to people whom history may have forgotten, but whom now we cannot.

The panorama is primarily a visual medium, but a variety of print matter mediated its viewing; adverts, reviews, handbills and a descriptive programme accompanied by an annotated key to the canvas. The short accounts, programs, reviews, articles and lectures collected here are the primary historical sources left to us.

The PIMS Yearbook is the annual yearbook of the International Panorama Council (IPC, Switzerland). It surveys the historical and contemporary landscape of panoramic and immersive media. This interdisciplinary field includes--but is not limited to--360-degree paintings; dioramas and museum displays; gaming; gardens; immersive experience; maps; material culture studies; media archeology; nineteenth-century popular media; optical and haptic devices; performative media; printed matter; public history; and virtual and augmented reality. Whereas the notion of the panoramic describes extensive, expansive and/or all-embracing vistas, immersion refers to porous interfaces between representation and the real, observer and observed, nature and culture, and past, present, and future. Together, the concepts of panorama and immersion have catalyzed time- and space-bending strategies for creating, experiencing, and transforming culture, ideas, and built and social space across the arc of human history. The PIMS Yearbook presents a range of disciplinary perspectives with the understanding that methodologies in the humanities, the arts, the sciences, design disciplines, social sciences, engineering, and other fields contribute important perspectives to the interdisciplinary field of panoramic and immersive media studies. The IPC is the international organization of panorama specialists committed to supporting the heritage and conservation of extant nineteenth and early-twentieth-century panoramas, and promoting awareness of the medium's history, derivative forms, and contemporary iterations. As a non-government and not-for-profit association subject to Swiss law, the IPC is active in the fields of panorama research, restoration, financing, management, exhibition, and marketing. The PIMS Yearbook succeeds the International Panorama Council Journal (IPCJ), a selected proceedings of the annual conferences of the IPC, published 2017-2023.