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Cool Item Of the Week: Wid's Yearbook 1920

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Added: 04/25/2011

As many of you know, I, Bruce Hershenson, owner of eMoviePoster.com, have collected pressbooks (and related movie paper like studio yearbooks) for over 30 years, and I have the world's foremost collection of such material. I thought I would share one item with you each week, the type of items you almost surely have never seen before, and which might not come up for sale for DECADES!

This week, I have the Wid's Year Book for 1920 book. You may THINK you have no idea what a "Wid" is, but this was the forerunner of "Film Daily", which was a daily publication that existed from 1915 to 1970, and which was the main source of news on the film and television industries. It covered the latest trade news, film reviews, financial updates, information on court cases and union difficulties, and equipment breakthroughs. You may have seen one or more of the annual Film Daily Year Books they published every year, but here is an ultra rare Year Book from the second to last year it was still called "Wid's".

What was a "Wid"? Wid was the first name of Wid Gunning, an incredible savvy Dane who started his Wid's Daily in 1915, and who published it for 6 six years. In 1921 he sold the publication (and the new owners renamed it Film Daily, and he returned to his native Denmark a wealthy man, and between 1921 and 1925 he produced four Danish movies that were adaptations of classic Charles Dickens novels (we have been fortunate to have sold a French poster from the first of these, and it can be seen at http://www.emovieposter.com/agallery/archiveitem/171171.html).

The Year Book below is filled with fascinating information about early Hollywood. I thought I would share with you six interior pages that are headlined "Some Men You Know".

Here they are, along with the cover (see larger images by clicking on these thumbnails):


 

What I find so fascinating is that on these six pages are most of the most important men involved in the creation of Hollywood, and yet there are also many others who seem to have been almost completely forgotten, but one would imagine that, in their day, they likely contributed as much or more as many of the household names.

Note the obvious "jockeying for better placement"! The head of Pathe (a world wide giant at that time), Paul Brunet, gets his image "bumped" up above that of Adolph Zukor and William Fox, and yet how many people remember him today? And Oscar Price, the forgotten President of "Assoc. Producers" gets a larger image than ALL the others! Look through all these images and see how many of the men you think are remembered today!

Each week I will showcase a different pressbook (or related item) from my collection (so in just 25,000 weeks or so, I will have shared the entire collection with you!).


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