Likewise, look forward to seeing the titles. Some very interesting points from Patrick and Rich too. Wouldn't say there are "virtually no quads from before 1960 in collectors' hands", but they are rare compared to US numbers. As Rich said, 1940s posters from the UK, particularly wartime, are very scarce because of paper shortages and rationing which continued beyond the end of the war. Not to mention heavy bombing/destruction during the war. Wartime posters were often printed on the back of other old posters. The austerity that this engendered may well have persisted into the 1950s, as rationing (food) only completely disappeared in 1954. Paper drives were encouraged by the government, where people and businesses were encouraged to have paper collected for pulping and recycling (nothing is new!). It also strikes me that photos I've seen of smaller regional cinemas in the UK up to the 60s show very little in the way of studio-issued posters - more commonly Front Of House stills and hand-written posters. Perhaps someone can confirm that impression I have. Certainly even when I started going to the cinema in the late 60s, I seem to remember FOH stills more than posters - or perhaps the area I grew up in was too provincial! I worked in a film archive for a few years and know from some of the archived material that cinema owners were quite fond of cutting up trade ads to use for display from the 30s onwards - cheaper than real posters. Pre-war the standard UK sizes equated to the US 3-sheet and 6-sheet (although perversely they were called 6-sheets and 12-sheets), and were presumably mostly pasted up, yet another reason why very few survived. Having ploughed through quite a few UK and US pressbooks for the same titles from the 20s and 30s, it seems that vertical "quads" existed for some titles, but very often these were actually the US 1-sheet! Same is true for lobby cards. Before seeing examples of this, I had no idea that US materials were used in the UK in this way. As somewhat more of a guess, the UK is a comparatively small area, so I would imagine that posters could be passed from cinema to cinema a lot more easily along with the actual film prints. This would obviously mean more wear and tear, and less opportunity for cinema owners to hang onto them. I know that the film reels were passed around at quite a frequent rate, as they tended to be booked on a weekly basis, and new prints were very expensive to produce. This probably became less of an issue by the time economic boom of the 60s came along. Even in the 60s though, I've seen notes from desperate distributors pleading for quick return of promotional materials due to shortage. Paul _www.movieposterstudio.com_ (http://www.movieposterstudio.com/)
In a message dated 22/04/2009 14:44:07 GMT Daylight Time, [email protected] writes: I will be listing a single owner collection of British Quads, beginning the 28th, and the collection contains a lot of older quads, and I am struck by the fact that, in all my years in the hobby, I have seen just a tiny number of quads from before 1960 (and even most titles from the early 1960s seem to be many times more rare than their U.S. counterparts). This collection contains 23 from the 1940s, 228 from the 1950s, 120 from the 1960s, and 116 from the 1970s to present! I am hoping MoPo members (especially long time collectors/dealers, and even more so those from the U.K.) can weigh in on the following: 1) Am I correct in thinking that there are virtually no quads from before 1960 in collectors' hands? 2) In all my years, I have personally only ever seen a handful of pre-1960 quads before viewing this collection; has anyone here seen any substantial number of them? 3) If they are as rare as I have stated, WHY is that? I understand that pre-WWII paper from all European countries is super-scarce, but in all other European countries you can easily find just about every post WWII title. Why is the U.K. different from the other countries? Is it that they had far fewer cinemas? Any light anyone here can shed on this will be greatly appreciated! Bruce Visit the MoPo Mailing List Web Site at www.filmfan.com ___________________________________________________________________ How to UNSUBSCRIBE from the MoPo Mailing List Send a message addressed to: [email protected] In the BODY of your message type: SIGNOFF MOPO-L The author of this message is solely responsible for its content.
