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Paramount Product Announcement 1932-1933, the 1932 Paramount campaign book sent to theater owners to encourage them to show Paramount movies. The book includes over 100 pages with one and two-page spreads on Paramount's upcoming movies and stars. Some of the movies and stars advertised include Blonde Venus (incredible two-page spread of Marlene Dietrich), Love Me Tonight, A Farewell to Arms, Deep Night (Marlene Dietrich), Blood and Sand (Tallulah Bankhead and Cary Grant), R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots, with Sylvia Sidney and Fredric March), The Mirrors of Washington (Tallulah Bankhead and Gary Cooper), Promised (Marlene Dietrich), No Bed of Her Own, Island of Lost Souls, The Four Marx Brothers (a great two-page Horse Feathers artwork ad by Constantin Alajalov, plus a page with photo portraits of all four brothers!), and many more! There is a four-page section that advertises Paramount short subjects, with a great full-page ad for Betty Boop, a page for Paramount Screen Songs with art by Sam Berman, 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 some unbelievable movies that never got made (it seems really likely that the deepening of the Great Depression caused many of these proposed movies to be cancelled, and some were made with different actors). We have included images of the front cover of the book and ten 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 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 in a very large size, but it is not hardcover, and it does not have full-color pages, but it DOES have 112 pages, and they are filled with movies that ended up being made with different stars, or were never made at all, and there are multiple pages each on Paramount's greatest stars! 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 that there is an oddity in how all examples of this book were bound. It had something to do with the binding techniques at the time, but at various places within the book, there is a thin strip of blank paper between two pages. At first glance, you might think that represents a cut out page, but it is just how they did the binding with this particular book. As we said, all examples of this book have this, and it is not any sort of defect!
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