Archive from one of London’s most famous bookshops will be sold at a major cinema auction in Dallas next month.
The Yakob Zentner Collection Hollywood/Entertainment Signature Auction at Heritage Auctions is built around more than 200 items linked to the Cinema Bookshop in Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury, London.
The store was opened in 1969 by Fred Zetner, whose Jewish family had fled Nazi occupation of the Sudetenland in 1939.
A childhood enthusiasm for film, and particlarly reading about film, became an internationally renowned bookstore with a significant archive, some of which will be sold next month.
Among many highlights is a significant set of Orson Welles photographs and documents that take in the actor/director’s career from the age of three (photographed with his mother Beatrice Ives) and includes two signed items, a photograph and a hand-drawn Christmas card from 1954.
Heritage said: “They show Welles as boy, magician, filmmaker, exile, and mythmaker—seen not only through the public lens, but in private gesture, press image, and artistic reflection. No other offering captures the arc, artistry, and personality of Welles’s life with this visual and historical command.”
A still from Metropolis from the Yakob Zentner Collection, which is a gold mine for fans of early Hollywood cinema. Image courtesy of Heritage Auctions, ha.com.
A starting bid of $3,750 ($4,688 with buyer’s premium) is asked.
Needing a $3,000 ($3,750) opening bid is a collection of classic horror film photographs, that include hand-painted glass negatives by Conrad Tischler to create a visual illusion that extended physical sets on screen. Some come from Dracula (1931), one of the most loved Universal horrors starring Bela Lugosi and directed by Tod Browning, who would later make Freaks, one of Hollywood’s most controversial ever films.
Film posters will also attract interest, including a Forbidden Planet poster from 1956 predicted to realise over $4,000.
The materials, which take in stills, publicity photographs, posters, and lots of other publicity materials date back as far as the 1920s.
Film memorabilia has a large collecting community and some items can be very valuable. The most valuable film poster is a 1927 Metropolis poster of which only four copies are known. One was sold for $690,000 in 2005.
