December 6, 2009 10:34 p.m.

What huge displacements have occurred in my collecting recently! Many of you know that I've been sloooowly selling off bits of my onesheet collection because I decided to focus in on advertising and Japanese material. I still collect onesheets mind you, but much less and more for fun to fill the lightboxes with new releases and forthcoming movies that I like. Right now, I have the Avatar lenticular in one box, and the Mad Hatter version of Alice in Wonderland in the other. There are some worthy onesheets that I will continue to collect.

The real surprise is how things have changed for me in the last six years or so of collecting. When I started, I was enamoured with double sided onesheets and I would buy nothing else. Then I started buying international onesheets because so often the art is much better or alternatively cooler than the US counterparts. Stepping across the international boundaries, I started finding French paper, then some Russian and Polish paper. I realized that slowly, my horizons were broadening. When I came across the first B1 in my collection (it was Saruri - the Japanese title for Memoirs of a Geisha), I bought it because the seller mistakenly described it as a double sided onesheet. What arrived was what is to this day one of the most beautiful posters in my collection - My First Japanese B1. That's about all it took. I coveted the large size of the B1, and at that point, I limited myself only to B1's! There I went again with the limits, and again I threw them out. You'll find around 500 B2's in my collection now, and they have found a place in my heart. At this point, my love of the Japanese art has much overshadowed my roots in the onesheet. But, there is a commonality of sorts with the advertising onesheets I started with.

I think my first advertising piece was a THX poster I bought years ago for five bucks. Then, I got my beloved King Tut mylar from Muvico years ago when the Exhibit was in town, and that was for free. I discovered that not many people collect ad posters -- that is, posters used in a theater to advertise things other than films. I also discovered that these things are thrown away and it seems no one preserves even the images of them. Well, that really hooked me. Cheap, hard to find posters. A collector's dream. Fast forward years later, and I have over 400 advertising pieces in my collection. It has broadened to encompass various formats other than onesheets, including Japanese material and bus shelters (which I adore - I display them in a bus shelter sized lightbox in my living room!).

How focused things have become! There are 118 posters in this update. Usually, I cull 5 or 10 to put on this page as examples of the best of the lot. Going through these posters, I just could not single out more than two, because to me, they are all wonderful. These two I chose solely to highlight just how superb advertising and Japanese posters are. First, here's a bus shelter from Amsterdam advertising Jaegermister:

When I saw this, I clearly discovered what I enjoy so deeply about advertising material. These images are the icons of my time. I know that looking back twenty years hence, I will relish these posters and these images, and they will serve as a physical linkage to the past that would otherwise fade with my softening brain. Have a look at the other advertising posters listed in the New Arrivals. You'll see what I mean.

Then there's the Japanese material. There's a bunch of it listed here, but I think this B1 for Mystic River is the finest of the lot:

I hope you enjoy these posters as much as I do. There's some other changes afoot. The New Arrivals section is indicative of the overhaul I'm giving this site. It's too cumbersome to view the images given the large number now hosted here. Also, it's too damned difficult to update the image catalogs with so many to be included in each catalog. Finally, I am no longer going to annotate individual posters with any information. It takes too long. Also, I don't need to do it any longer insofar as I started that practice to keep me focused on why I was collecting in the first place. In other words, I've grown a bit.

Note some terminology in the file names listed for the posters. RDSH means rolled, double sided and that the picture is mine. RSSH means rolled, single sided and my picture. F stands for folded. The rest is pretty self explanatory. From each poster listed, with its file name, the goal is to be able to determine the country of original, whether rolled or folded, and whether single or double sided. If no country of origin is listed, its US or international release. I do not labor over tagging Japanese b2's as roled or folded. Most are either rolled or soft folded. That's it! Enjoy!