[3] Once they acquired a camera, John and Bill spent their holidays making films about coastal and rural life in Kent and Cornwall.

[7] They opened a second-hand bookshop specializing in books devoted to the moving image and John began to research and write on the histories associated with their collection.

[1] Eventually, the brothers closed the bookshop and sold their collection by catalogue alone, supplying books and artefacts to scholars and film museums around the world.

[6] In 1963, Bill went filming overseas, and John and his wife Carmen opened the Barnes Museum of Cinematography in St Ives to display the wondrous collection which the brothers had amassed.

[6][7] The museum’s famed collection drew film scholars from around the world and its catalogues became important documentary sources as serious interest grew in the history of cinema.

[3] For this reason, the Barnes’ unparalleled collection was acquired by the Museo Nazionale del Cinema of Turin in the 1990s, where it is now displayed,[3] while much of the remainder is now housed in the Hove Museum and Art Gallery, near Brighton.

He also delved into trade periodicals relevant to film and the complementary subjects of the music hall, photography, and the magic lantern.

The book traced the history of film through the machinery and then the personalities involved in the art, through to modes of exhibition and a thorough filmography for the period.

[6] “While other areas of academic cinema history seem doomed to atrophy, as films that were once entertaining no longer entertain, Victorian cinema is alive with debate and discovery … This is perhaps Barnes’ greatest achievement, to have achieved the trick that film has always claimed to do, to abolish time.” urbanora [6] Barnes died from cancer in June 2008, aged 87.