Here are some ultra-rare items of movie memorabilia sure to pre-date all of us.

Memorabilia from the silent movie era is understandably incredibly hard to find and – in the case of posters at least – hugely expensive. So I was very pleased to come across recently a haul of 50 copies of the fascinating French movie magazine Ciné-Miroir dating from the years 1922-1930. These have become by far the oldest items in my collection.

Ciné-Miroir was a fortnightly title that ran from 1922 to 1953 (with an interruption during WW2). It was a 16-page format and featured a mixture of French and Hollywood productions. The copies I have include features on Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and the Lon Chaney version of The Phantom of the Opera, amongst others. 

The first cover at the top of this page features both Gary Cooper and Fay Wray in a legendary ‘lost’ film Legion of the Condemned, for which no copies remain, so this image has extra rarity-value. The other cover stars I am not so familiar with, but they make for very striking mementoes of a long-bygone era, both for the fashions of the day and the style of movie-making. 

Some of these may well be the only physical copies still in existence. Given many of these magazines are now almost 100 years old, some are in an understandably crumbly condition, but others are remarkably well preserved for their age. Given I am not a huge collector of magazines (with a few exceptions) I plan to keep a few but will sell off the majority to silent movie era fans. These magazines are a part of history, and they deserve to be preserved for posterity by collectors who will appreciate them.