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RKO Radio Pictures 1936-37 ("Next year in black and white"), the 1936 spiral-bound campaign book sent to theater owners to encourage them to show RKO movies. The book includes 40 pages with one and two-page spreads on RKO's upcoming movies. Some of the movies listed include "Breakfast for Two" (Barbara Stanwyck and Herbert Marshall), "Gunga Din", Walt Disney (RKO had just signed Disney away from United Artists, and their ad says "Walt Disney has chosen RKO-RADIO to distribute 'Mickey Mouse' and 'Silly Symphonies' on the 1936-37 program, at the completion of his existing contract with United Artists", and there is cool art of Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse, and the old version of Donald Duck), Bobby Breen, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Katharine Hepburn, Robert Donat, and many more! We have included images of the front cover of the book and many of the two-page spreads (but we wish we could have photographed the entire book, because there are so many great images!). 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! Finally, note that this was issued in two versions. There was a spiral-bound version and a much more elaborate version that had a heavy metallic die-cut cover bound over the regular version (which is incredibly rare).
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Important Added Info: Note that RKO did two things unusual in the printing of this specific campaign book! First, they created a really cool heavy "metallic" die-cut cover (but they never did that again, so it was obviously too expensive!). I have seen other versions of this book WITHOUT the metallic covers (the interior cover works just as well as a front cover), so I wonder if the version with the metallic cover only went to major theaters or top executives (I have seen similar "special" versions on other campaign books). They also apparently realized that many theater owners liked to look at the ads, and lay the book flat, and in previous years, they must have gotten complaints that the books cracked at the spine, because for this year, they printed the book with a spiral binding included, which means that the book could be completely opened flat without the slightest damage to the book! Apparently, this also was too expensive to do, because I have only ever seen it on a couple of other campaign books, but it really does let you much better look at and appreciate this book without fear of damaging it!

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