Two or three things you don’t know about me. Firstly, I run a second-hand bookshop in Paisley, Scotland, called Abbey Books. Secondly, I have a massive collection of movie posters, pressbooks, magazines and what-have-you. And, thirdly, I’ve connected these interests in an exhibition of movie memorabilia on the walls and bookcases of the shop.
You’ll probably have seen my various Behind the Scenes articles on Pressbooks relating to a particular movie and perhaps not realized I was able to write it because I had the Pressbook (also known as a Exhibitor’ Campaign Manual) to hand. I’ve also got a stack of trade magazines which contain very rare material – ads that never saw the light of day in consumer magazines or newspapers, many of them pop-up, gatefolds or fold-outs.
My all-time favorite in that department is the four-page glossy pull-out teaser ad that ran in Box Office magazine in April 1977 that announced Close Encounters of the Third Kind would appear at Christmas 1977, unaware that by that point Star Wars would have rewritten the genre.
I’ve got quads (both vertical and horizontal), half-sheets, insert posters, heralds, window cards, stills, pressbooks, double-page spread trade mag ads and souvenir programmes. Among my magazine selections are Box Office, Motion Picture Herald, Kine Weekly, ABC Film Review, Films & Filming, Focus on Film, Cinema Retro, Sight and Sound, Star Wars magazine and books, Lord of the Rings magazines and various MCU and DC comics and graphic novels.
The exhibition covers the walls of the three rooms of the bookshop, so that’s around 12 walls of movie memorabilia. The oldest item is the Pressbook for Edward G. Robinson’s gangster picture Thunder in the City (1937). John Wayne in 1940 is represented by the insert poster for Dark Command and window card for Seven Sinners with Marlene Dietrich. I’ve got a window card from For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), the Pressbook for Love Happy (1949) – Marilyn Monroe Meets The Marx Bros – and for the 1952 reissue of Hitchcock’s Rebecca, a half-sheet for The Rains of Ranchipur (1955) starring Lana Turner, and a quad for The Prisoner (1955) starring Alec Guinness.
You might want to check out the Pressbook for Sudden Fear (1952) starring Joan Crawford or Lady in Cement (1968) with Frank Sinatra tangling with Raquel Welch or window cards for another Gary Cooper effort Casanova Brown (1944) or Lew Ayres in early John Sturges western The Capture (1950). Or pressbooks for Dillinger (1973), The Female Bunch (1971), the original movie version of Westworld (1973), Clint Eastwood in The Beguiled (1971) and The Headless Ghost (1959).
There also posters etc from Where Eagles Dare, She, War and Peace (1956), Bigger Than Life, Cat Ballou, That Darn Cat!, The Scalphunters, Marooned, Mackenna’s Gold, Lawrence of Arabia, Macao, Giant, Blindfold, Chinatown, Play Dirty, The Secret of Santa Vittoria, The Diary of Anne Frank, The Las Vegas Story, The Collector, Zulu Dawn, and so on and so on.
Among our selection of movie souvenir brochures are: The Guns of Navarone (1961), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Isadora (1968), Paint Your Wagon (1969), El Cid (1961), The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965), Cleopatra (1963), Hawaii (1966), Cromwell (1970), Camelot (1967), Lord Jim (1965) and Far from the Madding Crowd (1967). I had imagined that souvenir brochures had disappeared at the end of the roadshow era but actually I have ones for The Horsemen (1971) and The Valachi Papers (1972).
Famous illustrators featured throughout the collection include Tom Chantrell, Robert McGinnis and Howard Terpning.
As far as I can see there are precious few movie memorabilia shops left anywhere in the world. Most items are now sold online or at auction. So here’s a very rare chance to see these old posters and memorabilia relating to favored movies or ones that trigger a memory.
Pop in and see the exhibition. Everything is for sale.
Abbey Books, 21 Wellmeadow St, Paisley PA1 2EF. Opening hours – Tue-Sat 10.15am-17.15pm.
Don’t wait.
The Magnificent 60s 