Movie Lobby Cards, ca. 1934
GUEST:
These scrapbooks were given to me by an elderly aunt. She never threw anything away and collected lots and lots of things and I think I inherited some of those characteristics from her. So she felt that they would be safe and in good hands if she gave them to me.
APPRAISER:
Now, you brought four books. When you first put these down on my table, I opened it up and judging by this front page, I felt this was what's called a studio yearbook. Every movie studio would put out a yearbook at the beginning of the year, telling all the theater owners what films were coming up and they would put in a sample ad and information. Then I flipped the page and of course there it was. There's the first film that they were going to release that year, the information about it. But then when I flipped the page again, I found this collection of reviews from motion picture trade papers. Somebody obviously took these pages and pasted in reviews. A film annual like this is not tremendously valuable unless there's a famous film in it. Then we come to the 20th Century book. This is 1934 and 20th Century was one of the big presentations in 1934. And I turn the page and I see that someone here has not only pasted something in that wasn't there before, they've pasted in a part of a giant lobby card, so my interest was piqued. And here's the usual clippings as in the other book, which is not very financially rewarding. And then we come to “It Happened One Night,” which was another big film of 1934. As a matter of fact, it won more Academy Awards that year than any film had won up to that point. And what somebody had pasted in here were the lobby cards for “It Happened One Night.” Now, these were 11x14 cards that used to come in a set of eight. They were put in the lobby of the movie theater in order to tell you what was coming the next week. The problem is that somebody has trimmed these lobby cards and reduced their value significantly. This particular lobby card I had at an auction two years ago and it sold for $1,100 on its own. In this condition, it would only sell for a few hundred dollars. But then I came to this and these are called jumbo lobby cards. They're very unusual. They were only made for a brief period in the 1930s and none are known to exist from “It Happened One Night.”
GUEST:
(chuckles)
APPAISER: And you have...six of them. They came in sets of eight, also, so there's two missing. But that really doesn't make any difference because jumbo lobby cards invariably sell by the each. I've never known a complete set to come on the market from any film because only... only a few hundred of these were produced for each film because very few theaters had the frames for them. They had the frames for the 11x14s but not for these large ones. Only the big, downtown, first-run movie theaters were able to show these. They haven't come to the market in any format and even with the... with the trimming, you'd have to be looking at somewhere about $1,200 to $1,500 for each of these jumbo lobby cards.
GUEST:
Oh, God.
APPRASIER: So it's one of the most popular films of the '30s for collecting paper. The poster goes for $14,000 to $15,000 and the jumbo lobby cards in… in proportion would sell in that range of $1,000.
GUEST:
So what do you think my collection is worth?
APPRASIER: Well, with the... with the trimmed cards and with this and six of them, about $10,000 to $12,000 because there's two more books of material there, too.
GUEST:
Yes.
APPRAISER:
It's a great collection.
GUEST:
Wow! My husband is probably dying at this point.
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