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Boxoffice Records Season 1939-1940, the 1940 movie book featuring the top films of the previous years, with lists of the best selling movies, stars, directors, and more! This was a hardcover book published by Boxoffice magazine from at least 1937 through 1943. Each year's edition had a hyphenated year (1937-38, etc), and each book listed the movies from that time period that did "better than average", and also those that did "below average", using a scale like an "IQ", where 100 was average, and a number below that was below average, and a number above that was above average! Interestingly, they also rated actors, directors, producers, and writers, with the same scale. This makes for fascinating reading, because you can clearly see which movies did the best by far (like Boom Town, which had an astounding 215 rating, and most of the others were 149 and below). Note that apparently Gone With the Wind had not been open long enough when this book was published to qualify for inclusion in the interior pages, but the publisher added a special ad on the back cover stating how well Technicolor movies did, and they reference the ratings of the last four Technicolor movies, which were 168 for A Star is Born, 219 for Snow White, 182 for Jesse James, and 394 for Gone With the Wind, which likely was the best rating for any movie ever! And they did the records for the actors, writers, directors, and producers by averaging the movies they had made that year (if they made more than one), so those directors, like Michael Curtiz, who directed The Sea Hawk, which got 149, got pulled down by his other three movies that year, which were all above average, but lower than Sea Hawk! In addition to the many lists, there are also ads for stars, movies, and directors, paid for by their studios or by the stars themselves. Until we were consigned three different volumes of this in 2020, we had never before auctioned even one of these, so they are surely incredibly rare, and we have additionally been consigned a single volume from 1942-43! The cover price of this book was $2, as indicated in the first interior page. If anyone knows more about this, please e-mail us and we will post it here.
NOTE: Click on linked names to see a biography.

Important Added Info: Note that this is book is one of the three referred to above, and it is not only the only example of this book we have ever auctioned, but this, and the two others we are currently auctioning, are the only examples of this book from any years that we have ever auctioned. Note that all three of these books were "de-accessioned" from the Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (they were deemed unneeded, or perhaps they were duplicates). Also note that we have pictured the front cover, the title page, and the interior page that shows the publishing information, and one or more interior 2-page spreads.

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