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Paramount 1927-1928, the 1927 French Paramount campaign book ("Livre D'or Saison 1927-28"), created by Paramount Pictures in 1927 to promote their upcoming releases in France. Unlike U.S. campaign books of this time, this wonderful book has a page of credits for each movie with a facing full-color artwork image for that movie (beautiful art that we don't believe appeared anywhere else), followed by a "pressbook page" (with black & white images of several of the French posters) and an additional facing page with both black & white photos of the stars and the movie, and sometimes additional black & white artwork, sometimes with captions under the images. So EVERY one of the movies receives four full pages, and each has a full-color artwork image (which is why there are 173 pages in this), PLUS you get the poster images from the pressbook page for each movie. This is completely different from the U.S. Paramount book from this year, and it is of course entirely in French, and the artwork images are completely different from the U.S. posters, so they were created solely for the French market (apparently Paramount had a HUGE French distribution network at this time!). We have pictured images of some of the cool artwork contained in this book, and you can see from those some of the movies that were advertised. 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 ARTWORK IMAGES (some of the artwork is signed). We have included images of the cover of the book and eleven of the interior two-page spreads (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 (and French editions of campaign books are incredibly rare!). 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!

Important Added Info: Note that we have previously auctioned three examples of this French campaign book, and the last one sold for $725!

Note: We have 16 images of this campaign book, but due to a space limitation, only TEN of the 16 images are displayed above. However, there is a "supersize" link to the right of those images that lets you see the other 6.

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