What's new in 2024 ?

We decided in late 2022 to wind down our hunt for new posters and film ephemera. Last year  we acquired only six film posters –- four of which were either designed by or represented films produced by, Karl Ritter --  one of our major collection focuses. New acquisitions of importance shall be added to this page as the year 2024 unfolds......  and we will continue well into the future adding new pages and images and themes to this website and keeping it as current as possible.

Thank you for visiting, and returning,  to this website.

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Update: 22 January 2024:

Due to logistical issues beyond our control, the large two-sheet Italian poster for Karl Ritter's Pour le Mérite is still in Europe. This poster is shown in our "What's New in 2023?"  webpage as having been won at auction in December 2023. It required an export licence approval under the Italian laws regarding cultural heritage protection.  We should have the poster in our possession no later than mid–year. UPDATE: As at 20 April this  huge Italian poster is in our possession and we have added it to our Poster Gallery.  It is 200,00 x 140,00 cm /  78.74 x 55.12 in. large.

A book review of our latest volume  Hitler Youth Quex – A Guide for the English–speaking Reader is set to appear in a forthcoming issue of the prestigious academic journal The Historical Journal of Film, Radio & Television (U.K.) and also in the next issue of Germany's premiere film journal, Filmblatt. These reviews have been confirmed to us by their respective Editors.

Update at 29 February 2024:

The Historical Journal of Film, Radio & Television (U.K.) book review of our Hitler Youth Quex – A Guide for the English–speaking Reader has now appeared, and amongst other comments it says:

[T]he greatest merit of Gillespie’s book is that he not only brings together many sources that are – if at all – difficult to access, but also that he makes them accessible to an English-speaking audience.
Hitler Youth Quex: A Guide for the English-speaking Reader’s unique selling point ….is the way it presents and discusses a range of different primary sources and embeds them in the historical context.

"Gillespie's book is a treasure trove for scholars of history, film history and propaganda more generally. This includes graduate and postgraduate students, early career researchers and more established academics. As such it is recommended for the essential classroom reading lists on any course dealing with film propaganda."

The senior official at a major German film institution has read the HJFR&T review and subsequently wrote us as follows:

" Congratulations to your book and I absolutely agree with Hochscherfs recommendations. This should result in the book's presence in many libraries and will help students a lot to understand the film."

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We have in this Collection a great selection of original materials on Leni Riefenstahl's two trail-blazing Olympia films.  We own eight original posters from France, Belgium, Imperial Japan, Finland and from Czechoslovakia.  The two Czech posters are mirror images of the original German posters, but with Czech language text. They are so rare that Leni's cameraman and later husband, Horst Kettner, offered to buy them for her private Collection in 2008, which he owned after her death. We also have a superb variety of promotional materials from France, Spain, and  Germany  such as press-books, colour advertising pieces, etc. We also have 85 lobby cards and  3 press-photos for the two films.

On February 3rd we won at auction the ultra–rare Tobis film studio cinema owner's guide to both of the Olympia films -- the Werberatschlag -- which we had never seen before either in film archives nor in any collection in 30+ years. It is 56 pages long and has over a dozen pages of B&W illustrations of the German film posters and all the marketing materials available to cinema owners in 1938 to promote both films. This is an outstanding addition to our Collection and caps it off perfectly.

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April 2nd update:

We shall be updating this page over the next months as we spend time in Europe,  should we discover any significant "must–have" film treasures.

We shall add in translation any quotes from the forth–coming German journal FILMBLATT's  review of our Hitler Youth Quex – A Guide for the English–speaking Reader book.

We shall be changing our "Poster of the Month"  in May.

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We have never owned a large number of film lobby cards or press photos from the excellent biopic Bismarck, starring Paul Hartmann in the title role. We have a number of original posters for the film from various countries.  We could therefore not resist scooping up 27 press photos with their mimeographed photo captions glued to the reverse sides.Here are a few of them as per the seller's website:

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In Berlin.  the weekly radio program guide for 1933 was found in an Antiquariat, and we purchased all 52 loose issues and then re-sold all issues leading up to mid-September that year as superfluous to requirements.. The magazine had one page devoted to a new film each week, as well as a guide of where each film was screening in metropolitan Berlin. The sixteen issues we kept for our Collection are those which document the Greater Berlin cinema run of Hitlerjunge Quex from its premiere at the Ufa-Palast-am-Zoo cinema through to the first week of  January 1934. The film was running at various movie theatres every day for those three and a half months. In all, including the Ufa-Palast-am-Zoo, at one hundred and eleven  different cinemas.  Our page on this phenominal activity can be found here.

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