Milwaukee’s Movie Theaters (Arcadia Publishing), by Larry Widen

Larry Widen has already written two books on local cinemas before assembling the photographs and penning Milwaukee’s Movie Theaters for the Arcadia Images of America series. As the operator of two of the area’s surviving old-time bijous, the Times and the Rosebud, Widen has gained hands-on as well as archival experience. The pictures gathered for the new book offer glimpses of a past when every neighborhood has a single-screen movie theater, and many had several. Widen’s introduction provides a knowledgeable compact history that concludes by wondering about the future of going out to the movies. “Consumers spent $9.6 billion on movie tickets last year,” he writes, but “$35 billion [were] spent on DVD sales and rentals.”