Douglas DeLong - The Big Book of Vintage Movie Posters: Volume One: A Kindle Coffee Table Book

Its funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

The Big Book of Vintage Movie Posters: Volume Two
The Big Book of Vintage Movie Posters: Volume Three
The Big Book of Vintage Advertising Posters: Volume One
The Big Book of Vintage Advertising Posters: Volume Two
The Big Book of Vintage Advertising Posters: Volume Three
Arts Most Beautiful Women
Arts Most Beautiful Nudes
Arts Most Beautiful Orientalist Paintings
The Yesteryear Gazette: Volume One
The Yesteryear Gazette: Volume Two
The Yesteryear Gazette: Volume Three

(This is the first volume of a three-volume set of vintage hand-painted movie posters. The entire set consists of over 600 high-resolution images that have been digitally-enhanced in order to give them maximum impact. Most posters represent movies from the first three decades of the 20th century.)

These days most movie posters use photographs of scenes or characters from the movie but before the 1990s most movie posters employed hand-painted art to depict the scenes or characters. And they didnt skimp on the budget for the art department, hiring well-known artists to paint their posters, which had become an integral part of movie studio advertising. Unfortunately for the artists, they were rarely given credit for their work, with their signatures almost never appearing on the poster.

Posters have been used almost from the very beginning of film exhibitions, with the first poster being made for LArroseur Arrose, an 1895 movie by the Lumiere brothers in France. Today, movie posters are traditionally displayed inside or outside of the theater where the movie is playing, as well as in various media for advertising purposes, although these days many theaters use video displays instead of paper posters.

Historically, many movie posters ended up being thrown out after they were no longer needed, but some ended up in the hands of collectors and today there is a thriving market for collectible movie posters. On December 11, 1990, Christies presented the first ever auction by a major auction house consisting exclusively of vintage movie posters, raking in a total of $935,000 for 271 posters. The most money ever paid for a single movie poster is $690,000, for Fritz Langs 1927 film Metropolis from the Reel Poster Gallery in London. Early American horror films have been especially in demand by collectors, with a poster for The Mummy being sold for $452,000 in 1997. In 2011, 33 movie posters from 1930-1931 were found in an attic in Berwick, Pennsylvania, where they had been used for insulation, and auctioned for $502,000 in March 2012. So the moral of the story is check your attic!

The focus of this book is on the remarkable art that was used to create these truly beautiful posters, but you may find yourself intrigued by some of these movies, many of which you were perhaps unaware. So if youre a lover of vintage movies, the good news is that many of the movies in this book are available for your viewing pleasure on YouTube.

If you enjoy this collection of movie poster art, be sure to check out the other two volumes in the set. And finally, if you have a spare moment, a quick review on our Amazon page or a short note on your social media pages would be greatly appreciated!

Douglas DeLong

May 2018