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The Only Announcement of Talking Features Only, the 1929 Fox campaign book, sent to theater owners to encourage them to show their new talking pictures. The book includes 72 pages with one and two-page spreads on Fox's upcoming movies, ALL with sensational art! Some of the movies and stars advertised include The Cisco Kid (with Warner Baxter), 4 Devils (with Janet Gaynor), Listen to the Band (with Lola Lane), The Holy Devil (with Paul Muni), The New Orleans Minstrels (with great colorful artwork, and the movie starred William Collier, so the minstrels may well have been in blackface, and the cast included "50 Creole dancing girls"!), and many more! We have included images of the covers of the book and three of the two-page spreads (and we did not make a big effort to find the best ones!). THE ARTWORK IN THIS CAMPAIGN BOOK IS SOME OF THE ABSOLUTE FINEST OF ANY CAMPAIGN BOOK I HAVE EVER SEEN! 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! In addition, there is a very odd mystery about this exact campaign book. We have auctioned two different versions, one which refers to "upcoming talking features" on the cover, and the other refers to "talking and singing Movietone productions" on the cover. The first is softcover and the second is hardcover. They have similar contents to each other, with each one having movies that the other doesn't, but they are not the same, and the page counts are different. We would think that the hardcover version was made for bigger theaters, but usually the hardcover version resembles the softcover with added material, and that is not the case here, so maybe these two books came out at different times of the year. If anyone knows more about this, please e-mail us and we will post it here. 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!
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Important Added Info: Note that studio owner William Fox completely thought that sound pictures were a "passing fad", and he stubbornly insisted on sticking with silent movies all through most of 1928! By 1929, he could see that he had been completely wrong, and he rushed many sound movies into production, and published this campaign book, which solely had ads for talking pictures, the only such campaign book I have seen. It is interesting to note that at this time, Fox had perhaps the best studio in Hollywood. He made a deal to purchase MGM, and had that deal gone through, the "Fox/MGM" studio would have likely dominated Hollywood for the entire next decade. But unfortunately for Fox, the stock market crashed before the deal could go through, and he was pretty much bankrupted by the experience!

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