BY LEE PFEIFFER
Those of us of a certain age can recall collecting movie pressbooks (called campaign books in the UK). These were sent by movie studios to theaters and served as a guide to the specific film, loaded with promotional ideas and alerting theater owners to merchandise they could tie into when showing the movie. Pressbooks are now a thing of the distant past, a casualty of the more cost-efficient method of providing publicity materials through on-line sites for which the press is given passwords. It may be more practical but there was great joy for collector's thumbing through these marvelous guides page-by-page. Here are some promotional blocks from the American pressbook for the 1969 comedy crime classic "The Italian Job" starring Michael Caine and Noel Coward. They recall a golden era when you could count on a vinyl soundtrack and paperback novel tie-in to accompany the release of a movie. It may surprise our readers to know that the film wasn't a hit in America but over the decades it has built a very loyal following in the UK where you can still buy a reproduction of the quad movie poster in souvenir stores in Piccadilly. As for the Americanized remake starring Mark Wahlberg, well, the less said the better.