eMoviePoster.com

We received this question from one of our regular buyers:

"Why is it that every time you hold an auction of rolled one sheets I can guarantee that the same titles - Racketeers, Night of Terror etc. (which I would have thought were obscure titles) appear week after week, month after month, year after year ? It almost seems that some these are being printed to order !! Considering your guarantee that all items are genuine it would re-assure me, as a long-established customer, if there was some explanation of this."

We replied:

"I understand what you are thinking, but there is an easy explanation that doesn't involve reproductions! When movies were distributed in the 1930s and 1940s, each studio would create their own posters (until one by one they all joined the NSS), and they would send out the posters along with the movies. Sometimes, they would end up with hundreds of a specific poster "left over", at a point where next-to-no one wanted to rent the movie anymore. Sometimes those would end up trashed, but many times 20 or 30 years later, someone would come across that huge stack or roll of posters, and then they would begin selling them in the collectors market. The posters you cite below all fall into this category. There might have been 20 of each found, or there might have been 200. But someone sent a bunch of them to us, and we auction them one at a time until we have auctioned the last one.

Sometimes the price drops drastically after it has been auctioned 10 or 20 times. But of course, if you wait until the last one is gone, then you can't get one at all. Plus, there have been some exceptions. There is a wonderful one-sheet for the silent movie called "The Bulldogger", and it has a fantastic stone litho image of a black cowboy. Several hundred were found in Florida, and they were sold for $300 or less over a period of ten years or so. "Everyone" thought that they would never go up in value, because there were "so many". But eventually they were all sold, and now you almost never see one offered for sale, and when someone does, it is usually in the $5,000 to $10,000 range!

So the above is why you sometimes see many examples of a poster from the 1930s or 1940s. We NEVER auction any reproductions in our regular auctions, and we very clearly mark them the few times we put them in our auctions of special posters.

Thanks,
Bruce"