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Paramount 1931-32, the 1931 Paramount campaign book ("Paramount's 20th Birthday Jubilee") sent to theater owners to encourage them to show Paramount movies. The book includes many pages with mostly one-page spreads on Paramount's upcoming movies and stars, including truly magnificent artwork! Some of the movies and stars advertised include Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (with Fredric March), No One Man (with Carole Lombard), City Streets (with Gary Cooper), Smiling Lieutenant (with Maurice Chevalier), Daughter of the Dragon (with Anna May Wong), Taboo (directed by Murnau), Monkey Business (with The Marx Brothers), Graft (with Gary Cooper), An American Tragedy (with Sylvia Sidney), Love Me Tonight (with Maurice Chevalier), Indiscretion (with Marlene Dietrich), and much, 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 sometimes did not use as much full-color artwork as the lesser studios, because they had so many great stars, BUT IN THIS CASE, THEY EMPLOYED REALLY WONDERFUL ARTISTS TO CREATE BEAUTIFUL ADS! We have included images of the cover of the book and several 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! 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 included with this book is a supplement page, which is a testimonial from Sam Katz, with his picture, stating that he "can truthfully say these productions present the greatest opportunity for theatre profits that have ever been offered to exhibitors". We believe that this page was added to some of the books after Mr. Katz told them how great their current offerings were (because we have auctioned examples of this book that do not have that page, but of course, it could simply have gotten lost). Also, these books were made before the studios' schedules were finalized, so sometimes there would be more than one version of the same book, because they had a last minute addition or subtraction. In the case of this book, they added a movie, "Murder by the Clock", at the last minute, and they simply printed a supplemental page advertising this movie that says "extra added attraction" at the top, and this page comes with this book (but it did not come with any of the previous versions of this book we had). See our images of these two supplemental pages.

Note: We have 15 images of this campaign book, but due to a space limitation, only TEN of the 15 images are displayed above. However, there is a "supersize" link to the right of those images that lets you see the other 5.

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