BORN TO LOVE Pressbook 1931 Red Cross nurse Constance Bennett, Joel McCrea, ultra rare oversized Pressbook! The only one listed on EBAY. Don't miss this one. The Pressbook is uncut but in used condition. The cover and all pages are loose and not attached to each other.
Born to Love, the 1931 Paul L. Stein World War I (WWI) military romantic love triangle melodrama (about an Army officer who is madly in love, but then he is missing in action, and when he returns, he discovers his girl has married someone else!) starring
Constance Bennett,
Joel McCrea, Paul Cavanagh, Frederick Kerr, Louise Closser Hale, Anthony Bushell, and Daisy Belmore
Pressbooks were special advertising booklets sent directly to theater owners that were playing the specific movie advertised in a particular pressbook (almost all pressbooks were for one movie only, although there were some double-bill pressbooks). A pressbook was made for every movie, starting in the mid 1910s through the 1970s (somewhere in the late 1960s, studios introduced "presskits", which included brochures and stills from the movie, but NO images of the posters, and for a few years, they made both, but then they stopped making pressbooks and only made presskits). There is no "standard" measurement for them, though each studio usuallyissued them at the same measurement during different periods of time.
Each pressbook (especially the early ones) is filled with lots of information about the movie that is contained no where else, including pictures of many of the posters and articles and ads as well, and the cover of the pressbook is often a color poster that could be framed, and on older pressbooks there is often a "sample" full-color herald attached to the pressbook, and yet, because many collectors don't know about pressbooks, the entire pressbook often sells for less than the price of a single lobby card from the same movie!
Pressbooks were sent to movie theater owners to help them promote the film. They have lots of "newspaper" black and white ads in various sizes for theaters to use in their local newspaper (theater owners would literally cut out the ad they wanted to use and give it to their local paper, which is precisely why so many pressbooks have ads cut out of them). For collectors, the most important thing about pressbooks is that they show many of the posters that were created for the film (one-sheet, three-sheet, etc.).
Sometimes not a single copy of a poster is known to exist and the only way you can tell what the poster looked like is by looking at a picture of it in the pressbook. In addition to poster images and newspaper ads, most pressbooks also have a synopsis of the film and other information like stories about several of the stars and sometimes a story about the making of the film, profiles of the lead actors, etc. Many pressbooks include unusual ways to promote the film such as having a nurse at the theater in case anyone fainted, vomit bags for queasy patrons, etc. They often contain info on other promotional items like photos, radio spots and standees that were available to the theater owner, most of which are not currently known.
In format, pressbooks are very similar to comic books. They often have two-color or full-color covers, but almost always have black & white interiors. Generally, the most important the film, and the older the film, the more elaborate the pressbook (larger size and greater number of pages).