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The Greatest Show on Earth, the 1929-1930 MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) campaign book, sent to theater owners to encourage them to show MGM movies. The book includes 75 pages with mostly two-page spreads (one four-page!) on MGM's upcoming movies and top stars. Some of the movies and stars advertised include Hallelujah (with incredible art, and it is just about the only place one can find an original U.S. advertising image!), Anna Christie (with Greta Garbo), The Viking (with great art of a naked female viking!), College Life (with John Held Jr. art), The Mysterious Island (with great fantasy art), The Bugle Sounds (with Lon Chaney), a cool ten-page section listing many MGM shorts, with some of the best artwork for shorts I have ever seen, including full-color art for Laurel & Hardy, Our Gang, Charley Chase, Harry Langdon, and much, much more! There is a great sixteen-page section called "Stars", which shows MGM's biggest stars (in incredible art by Vincentini), and it even has the famous MGM tagline at the beginning, "MGM has more stars than there are in Heaven". This was the time when MGM was transitioning to sound movies, as was the rest of Hollywood, and many of the films have large banner headings that say things like "with thrilling SOUND", but even those movies have "Also a SILENT Production", because there were still many theaters that had not yet bought sound equipment! Note that many of the pages have signed artwork, by many different (quite talented) artists. We have included images of the covers of the book and four of the two-page spreads (and we did not make a big effort to find the best ones!). 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! Also note that, as was often the case with these campaign books, some of the movies advertised were either never made, had their titles changed before they were released, or were made with different casts than those announced in the campaign book (I do not have time to research the titles in this campaign book to see which had changed titles or were never made, but if anyone has more information about any of these, please e-mail us and we will post it here)! 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). 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 a hardcover campaign book with an actual removable dustjacket. MGM, being a leading studio, 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 sometimes they would make both hardcover and softcover editions for the same reason. In the case of this campaign book, we don't know if it was also created in a softcover edition, because we have never seen or heard of a different version this ultra rare campaign book, but we have seen examples of this book that did not have the dustjacket, and the owners were selling them as "complete", because they did not know the dustjacket was missing!

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