Album de Cinelandia. Biografias y retratos autenticos

Hollywood, CA: Mac Printing Company, 1928. First Edition. Wraps. Very Good Plus. An oversized Hollywood facebook album from when they had faces, issued less than a year after the release of "The Jazz Singer", when silent movies was in its last gasp. Folio-sized, 14 by 10 inches, 35 by 26 cm. 201 pp. Photos of leading Hollywood stars on rectos, with biographical information on the facing page. Among the hundred stars are the giants, many whose names are still big, generally because they survived the transition to sound unharmed -- the obvious stars such as Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Gary Cooper, Clara Bow, Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Chaplin, Fairbanks, Marion Davies, Buster Keaton, Menjou, Janet Gaynor, etc. etc., as well as those whose names have become more obscure, or whose reputation for whatever reason is entirely centered in the silent era, such as Billie Dove, Renee Adoree, Doris Costello, Pola Negri, Langdon, Billy Haines, the Talmadge sisters, Esther Ralston, etc. etc. Al Jolson is among the stars, his turn in film the previous year marking the beginning of the end of the era captured by this album. The text is in Spanish, but it should be noted that it is far more than a simple translation of the contemporaneous actors photographic yearbook, with the biographical information occasionally getting into detail that was decidedly not issued by publicity central, albeit never venturing into the salacious and scandalous. The Orientalist color lithograph on the front cover of a beautiful woman with a vacant look while holding a bejeweled mirror and a mask of a theatrical muse is particularly attractive. The wraps have minor closed tears around the fringe, as inevitable in this instance if the book were ever shelved standing, and there is a slightly longer closed tear along upper front joint. Internally the book is clean and tight, and thus this is an exemplary copy really.