Home 9.5 16 Multi-gauge 17.5 28 Pix Miscellany
PATHÉ BABY
FILM CATALOGUES
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. 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...
These Supplements presumably are additions to the French catalogues; some are even earlier than the October 1923 catalogue above. Update July 2010. Thanks to
Dino Everett, we can now see an even earlier catlog, Xmas/New Year 1922/3, a four-pager, now added above. Dino points out that this must be a very early listing as
no film numbers are missing yet End Update.
This early supplement (above) shows yet another problem of trying to conserve these documents digitally. The first image is the original scan. You can see that it is
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.
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.
