BabyFilmcats
This says it is the first French descriptive catalogue and is dated October 1922. The individual pix did not survive the Great Software Disaster of 2014 so I am trying a PDF instead. I still have higher res scans in case.
David Richardson has kindly scanned all sorts of useful, early literature, including the catalogue from 1923 below. I have some difficulty with how to present such documents, including the 1922 catalogue above. Inevitably, the scanning process is imperfect; the slightest lack of flatness and "stains" appear. Try to adjust the background colour to what it might once have been before the paper faded, and you leach away some of the very wide range of colours of which the letters are composed. To show you, I have given 3 versions of pages 6&7; the original scan, a pale yellow/cream colour that I have found works well, and a rather stark black and white version. Deciding just how much work to do is difficult - it doesn't help that I quite enjoy doing it and find it quite compulsive - because it can be very time-consuming and there is just so much material. I shall have to leave most of them unprocessed for now. At least, I shall end up making a virtual archive of information that anyone can access, whereas actual copies are very rare indeed. I am very grateful to people like Dave who are willing to share their material in this way. He has also provided more of the Baby film leaflets - these, too, are unprocessed - which I have started to add - see Before PM...
Update July 2010.Thanks to Dino Everett for this (presumably abbreviated) catlog, Xmas/New Year 1922/3, a four-pager, now added above. Dino points out that no film numbers are missing yet!End Update
SUPPLEMENTS
These Supplements presumably are additions to the French 1922 and 1923 catalogues above. Comparing the two catlogs,the rate of growth in a single year is very evident.
March 1923
This early supplement (above) shows yet another problem of trying to conserve these documents digitally. The originals are in fact printed on a very faint background of strips of 9.5 film with indiscernible images. It is beyond my capabilities to preserve this and I have simply painted it out. Several at least of the supplements below were printed in the same way. Update June 2014. It now seems my scanner was at fault; some more recent scans have come out quite well. End Update.
April 1923
June 1923
July 1923
April 1924
July-August 1924
September 1924
November 1924
For some reason, the two centre pix escaped the Great Software Disaster of 2014, which is why these look a bit different.
December 1924
February 1925
March 1925
June-July 1925
August-September 1925
October 1925
The French illustrated catalogue for 1928 is available from me on CD-ROM for 3 post paid. It has around 270 pages; here are some sample pages.
The 1930 version is even more extensive, running to about 340 pages. I have made a quick comparison of the main numerical series.
1000 series: 1928 last No. 1154; 1930 1226
2000 series: 1928 last No. 2055; 1930 2099
3000 series: 1928 last No. 3008; 1930 3043
4000 series: 1928 None; 1930 4000 - 4029 inclusive.
5000 series: 1928 last No. 50001; 1930 5004
10,000 series: 1928 last No. 10198; 1930 10199 plus 10078, 10098, 10099 which do not appear in 1930.
None of this takes account of any numbers that may have been dropped from the catalogue.
French 1931
English Catalogues
See also the monthly/bi-monthly film release leaflets that preceded Pathescope Monthly, in Before PM.
I believe the Preliminary Catalogue below to be the very first British catalogue, issued in 1924.
Preliminary List
!st
6th
10th
11th
15th
20th
21st
22nd
24th
27th
The 27th is the latest I have a record of in this series. As you can see, these catalogues were produced cheaply, obviously as giveaways, with little regard for precision on layout. The 27th I have left mostly unchanged, as it is too much work, as I know from doing all the others. I have done one to a certain level, to illustrate the change and the effect on text of digitisation and cleaning up.
Other Countries
A Spanish catlog for March 1927, from Dino Everett. It shows once again the problem of translating these analogue documents to a digital format. I have given you two versions of each page, one the raw scan as it reached me, the other with varying degrees of work. I & 2 represent hours of work each, the others only a small amount of effort. Analogue to digital actually creates artefacts in the copy which then have to be somehow removed, as well as genuine imperfections. Assuming, that is, that preservation of these documents in this way is worth the effort. At least, in this way the information can be made widely available, even if the format has defects.
Here is one from just a few months later (September), already larger.
