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Paramount 1933-1934, the 1933 spiral-bound Paramount campaign book ("Show Business in the Hands of Showmen"), sent to theater owners to encourage them to show Paramount movies. The book includes 92 pages with one and two-page spreads on Paramount's upcoming movies and stars. Some of the movies and stars advertised include The Way To Love (Maurice Chevalier), I'm No Angel and It Ain't No Sin (Mae West, with a great full-page image of her with her now-classic trademark line "Come up and see me sometime - anytime"!), The Song of Songs (Marlene Dietrich), Duck Soup (the four Marx Brothers!), Alice in Wonderland (Paramount all-star cast!), Honor Bright (Gary Cooper & Claudette Colbert), Tillie and Gus (W.C. Fields), Marlene Dietrich (another added two-page spread!), twelve incredible pages filled with photo art images of Paramount's top stars, White Woman (with Dorothea Wieck, NOT Carole Lombard!), Funny Pages (an incredible two-page ad for a never-made movie that was intended to star the top Paramount stars as the greatest cartoon characters of the day, including W.C. Fields, Jack Oakie, and Grace Bradley, and such cartoon stars as Popeye, Blondie, and The Katzenjammer Kids), To the Last Man, The Thundering Herd, and The Code of the West (all Zane Grey productions, with an image of Zane Grey himself, plus covers of his books!), There Were Four Women (a never-made movie intended to be "Written and directed by Ernst Lubitsch", and starring Carole Lombard, Miriam Hopkins, Sylvia Sidney, Claudette Colbert, Fredric March, Gary Cooper, and Cary Grant!), Death Takes a Holiday (Fredric March), Swift Arrow (great Native American Indian art!), and many more! There is a six-page section that is excerpts from the "Paramount Blue Book of Shorts", with a great ad for Betty Boop and Out of the Inkwell cartoons, plus much more! Note that, because Paramount at this time was one of the very leading studios, and had many of the biggest name stars and directors, and also had lots of money to spend, they made lots of great movies this year, and they also were proposing many unbelievable movies that never got made (see some of the examples above; perhaps it was because the stars became too famous too quickly to make so many movies, or maybe it was because of the Great Depression, but this book has lots of never-made movies that one could only dream of!). Paramount did not use as much full-color artwork as the lesser studios, because they had so many great stars, but there are beautiful photographic images that are excellently laid out, and there ARE some artwork ads, most notably the two-page spread for Duck Soup in this campaign book! We have included images of the cover of the book and thirty-four of the interior pages (and we did not make a big effort to find the best ones, and we really wish we could have pictured them all!). Note that even though this campaign book was sent to many theater owners, it appears that very few examples have survived. I have been a collector of campaign books and related material for many years, and I know for certain that this campaign book is extremely rare! Note that some of the movies listed in this book may never have been made at all, and some had their titles changed, and some had their cast or director changed (we have cited a few obvious examples above, but we know there are many more)! Note that studios almost always spent far more money preparing campaign books than they did preparing movie posters (often hiring very talented and well-known illustration artists), because campaign books directly benefited the studio in getting theaters to book the movies, whereas posters more benefited the theaters, rather than the studios (although of course, what was good for the theaters was ultimately good for the studios as well). This particular campaign book was made with a spiral binding, which allows the pages to be opened completely flat without damaging the book, which is a real plus! In the case of Paramount, being a leading studio, they would prepare both larger versions and smaller versions of most of their campaign books (apparently giving the larger sized editions to the biggest theaters), and the campaign book offered here is the larger size edition, measuring a much larger-than-usual 14" x 17 1/4", and containing an unusually large number of pages, 92 (and this book is extremely rare, and we have never seen it in a smaller size, and have never seen it before at all!). Finally, note that campaign books in general are extremely rare, and the best of them have often sold for hundreds of dollars, and in the case of the very finest, thousands of dollars!
NOTE: Click on linked names to see a biography.

Important Added Info: Note that this is one of an excellent collection of seven extremely scarce studio campaign books (plus two similar items) we are selling this week on eBay (in seven separate auctions). Even though these are books that have sold for hundreds of dollars in the past, all begin with 99 cents with no reserve on any of them!

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