Horror and Mystery Photoplay Editions and Magazine Fictionizations, Volume II

By Thomas Mann

Photoplay editions were movie tie-in books that reprinted the novels on which films were based, illustrated with photos from the movies. Sometimes the novels were newly-created, based on scripts of the films, with publication timed to correspond with the films’ release. Comparable fictionizations of contemporary movies frequently appeared in short-story form within many popular movie magazines. Volume I of this catalog (2004) listed over 500 such tie-in stories connected to horror, mystery, science fiction, and related genre films. The present volume updates that list with hundreds of additional entries.

In his Introduction the author also provides a detailed analysis of some of the individual works, showing how many of the published stories, based on advance copies of the film scripts, contain scenes deleted from the release prints. As he did with the book volumes in Volume I, here in Volume II he also provides a fascinating analysis of the film magazines in their larger context as cultural artifacts of bygone eras.

The book concludes with a reprint of a previously unknown short story version of the lost Lon Chaney film, A Blind Bargain (1923).

Thomas Mann is an independent scholar living in Washington, D.C., where he spent over three decades as a general reference librarian in the Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress. He is the author of The Oxford Guide to Library Research (Oxford University Press, 2015).

• Language: English
• Publisher: BearManor Media
• Release date: Aug 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370900688

Book preview

Classic Cinema.

Timeless TV.

Retro Radio.

BearManor Media

BearManorBear-EBook

See our complete catalog at www.bearmanormedia.com

Horror and Mystery Photoplay Editions and Magazine Fictionizations, Volume II

© 2016 Thomas Mann. All Rights Reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, digital, photocopying or recording, except for the inclusion in a review, without permission in writing from the publisher.

This version of the book may be slightly abridged from the print version.

BearManorBear

Published in the USA by:

BearManor Media

PO Box 71426

Albany, Georgia 31708

www.bearmanormedia.com

ISBN 978-1-62933-071-6

Cover photo: actress Helen Twelvetrees in the lost film, The Cat Creeps (1930).

Cover Design by John Teehan.

eBook construction by Brian Pearce | Red Jacket Press.

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Catalog

Appendix: A Blind Bargain

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

All who love classic cinema, and the genres of mystery and horror, recognize Thomas Mann as the first scholar to comprehensively explore the dynamics of book and magazine publications as a form of movie promotion.  Mann combines the skills of a sleuth and career librarian (at the Library of Congress) with the enthusiasm of a true cineaste to reveal how the separate media of movies and publishing intersect.

Brian Taves, author of Hollywood Presents Jules Verne; PG Wodehouse in Hollywood; and Thomas Ince: Hollywood’s Independent Pioneer

You write books like this?

Pachera Yongvongpaibul (wife of Brian Taves)

Introduction

Volume I of this work was published in 2004 by McFarland; it is the catalog of a large private collection of old photoplay editions and magazine-story fictionized versions of contemporary horror and mystery films that appeared from the 1910s through approximately 1970. Photoplay editions, or movie editions, were usually hardcover novels whose stories had been made into motion pictures; the books were republished at the time of their respective films’ release, illustrated with photographs from the films, just as movie tie-in paperbacks are often issued today. Sometimes entirely new novels based on the film scripts were commissioned; the large majority of newly-fictionized versions of film stories, however, were written at short-story length for contemporary magazines, also illustrated with scenes from the films.

Books and magazines form the bulk of the collection, but the tie-ins appear in many formats: not just in single-novel books, both hardcover and paperback, but also in anthology collections, serial yearbooks, play scripts, comic books, Big Little Books, and even, in two cases, sheet music. Also included are novelizations of stage plays published with photo-illustrations. The boundaries of the set are somewhat diffuse at the edges; while the bulk is made up of horror and mystery tie-ins, it also includes those linked to science fiction films, some film noir, some Hitchcock, some jungle thrills pictures, and some romances, melodramas, westerns, or adventure stories that have mystery or outré elements. Also represented are books whose corresponding films feature such horror-genre actors as Lon Chaney, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, et al., in non-horror roles. (Specifying all of the outlying inclusions, however, would make for much too long a title.) Although most of the works listed are publications up through roughly 1970, some entries are later. This is, after all, a personal collection; I can recognize things to acquire even if I can’t always specify in advance a justifying rule. Two examples: I’ve included a two-volume French edition of Fantôme de l’Opéra because of its unique photo-illustrations; this is the only foreign-language item I’ve collected. I’ve also added a 1987 photo-illustrated play script based on the historical Vlad Dracula that I’ve never seen listed elsewhere.

Volume I of this catalog listed and annotated 543 titles (not counting cross-references when film titles diverged from the titles of their print counterparts), representing the state of the collection as of 2004. I have, of course, continued acquiring items since then, and the present volume lists more than 200 additional items. (Also present are a few modifications and expansions of the annotations given in Volume I.)

This work, in both volumes, cannot be considered an exhaustive roster of all photoplay editions even within its primary areas of focus. The most complete published listing is Arnie Davis’s Photoplay Editions and other Movie Tie-In Books: The Golden Years 1912-1969 (East Waterboro, Maine: Mainely Books, 2002), which I highly recommend. It lists over 6,200 books tied to over 4,000 films in all genres, not just horror stories, mysteries, and science fiction, but adventure stories, comedies, melodramas, romances, war stories, and westerns as well — way beyond the scope of my own collection. It also reproduces over 1,100 dust jackets and illustrated book covers. It is as close to a definitive bibliography of photoplay books as will ever be produced. By design, however, it does not cover tie-ins to stage plays or those appearing in comic book format or as magazine-story fictionizations (which form the bulk of the current work).

In not being so admirable a completist myself, there are a few notable omissions within the genre fields I do collect. I have never been overly concerned to acquire dust jackets, for instance, particularly if I already own a copy of the book without the wrapper. Probably the most valuable volumes in the whole collection are jacketed copies of King Kong, Frankenstein, and The Invisible Man; in that same rarified group would be Island of Dr. Moreau. My copy of the latter does not have the jacket, and I’ve never been eager to pay over $4,000 just to make up for the lack of one flimsy wrap-around. (Color photocopies of missing wrappers can be readily purchased on the Internet for those who think them necessary. I agree, however, with book collector A. Edward Newton’s observation that having a mere photocopy is like kissing someone through plate glass.)

Another conspicuous gap — conspicuous, at least, to purists — is the lack of either of the first British printings of the book version of Bride of Frankenstein (Readers Library or Queensway). In this catalog I have listed a recent reprint of the novel from BearManor Media; but the inclusion of such a non-original reprint may be horrifying to some. I have no problem with it, myself, in part because as I get older — I’ve been collecting for over fifty years, since I was 14 — I find that the most enjoyable aspect of the collection lies not in the mere possession of rare or curious physical artifacts but in actually reading their stories. Having the old Bride novel readily available in a new reprint, for me, deflates most of the attraction of possessing an original edition whose price these days hovers around $3,500 (if a copy can be found at all).

In this connection I remember once corresponding with a dealer (a regular supplier of photoplay editions) who was offering a copy of Arthur Bernède’s 1920s novel The Haunted House published by Readers Library. Bernède had previously written another book, The Mystery of the Louvre from the same publisher, and that one is a photoplay edition. I inquired of the dealer if this Haunted House volume was another film tie-in book, possibly linked (I hoped) to a lost 1928 film of the same title by Benjamin Christensen. He replied that he could not tell one way or the other; but his price was so low that I said that I’d buy the book anyway — I like haunted house stories even if not tied to films — and that I’d let him know if there was a film connection after I read the book. (A plot summary of the movie is available even though the film itself is lost.) His amazed response was to the effect, "Do you actually read these things?!"

Well, yes I do.

As I elaborated upon in the Introduction to Volume I, when I first started collecting in the early 1960s, I was a teenager in Chicago. With my interest in all things monster-connected, I saw these books as a way of experiencing scary old films that I thought I’d never be able to actually see. (This of course was an era prior to DVDs and Turner Classic Movies and YouTube and Netflix downloads, when the earth was still cooling. My hair was much darker, then, too — and I had more of it.) This quest was enough to set me eagerly prowling on many a Saturday during my high school years through Chicago’s then-abundant used-book stores.

What I did not — could not — collect in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s were the fictionizations of film stories that appeared in scores of contemporary movie magazines. Prior to the Internet and eBay it was impossible even to know that such things existed. Popular magazines of that type are very seldom collected in libraries; and their individual stories were not recorded anywhere. [1] Only with the opening of attics and the offerings of their contents on eBay in the 1990s did access become possible.

No correlation