Monday, April 22, 2013

Monday with Hayley Mills: Hayley and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Dress

I am in love with this photo and the dress worn by actress Hayley Mills. The setting, the pose, the entire scene is beautiful. I'm glad I can share it with any Hayley Mills fans who wander by.

About the Poster:

I am pretty sure that this over-sized fold out poster of actress Hayley Mills is from the Japanese celebrity magazine Eiga Joho (April 1966). The publication notes state this poster is included in the issue but my copy does not contain it. It was probably stripped out long ago for resale. Cutting out and removing unique ads, articles and photos is a common practice among those who resell ephemera, something I personally am conflicted about. One one hand items are being preserved that would otherwise vanish from age and neglect but on the other books and magazines are rendered almost useless for collection even as they are sold as complete. In some instances this may not be on purpose.

I have a number of vintage books where the best part was cut out and those sellers, I believe, were not aware that someone had removed pages before they received it. Once a magazine or book is stripped of a few interesting pages what is left is probably sold or donated. These will typically eventually end up at thrift stores or sold cheaply elsewhere. Much of the time luck and detective work is required to determine if old publications have been stripped. Sometimes it is obvious, like careless cuts and tears. Find an old copy of LIFE with no ads remaining in it and you know something is wrong. Sometimes it is harder to suss out as the vandal will only selectively remove pages that do not interfere with the flow of content and would otherwise be detected. A lot of times this is done to ensure multiple sales from one item.

On occasion the only way to know if some publications have been stripped of content is from comparison of copies of other vintage periodicals. Comparing copies to the other is a way to discover that pages might be missing or an issue is otherwise damaged. The best resource for this is badly aged or degraded copies. Many times the contents will remain intact because there is no resale value of a page because it is unattractive. Unfortunately some older magazines do not have page numbers, content pages or publication listings anywhere. It is up to the individual collector to create a record of the content and all too often information is repeatedly transcribed in error. This is common particularly when the references are from amateur crowd-sourced information posted to the internet. My personal copy of Eiga Joho has been through the hands of many sellers before I obtained it and each listing reported it was undamaged and complete.


I had seen the poster on the internet long ago but it existed only as a tiny thumbnail in the cache of a seller's defunct website. It was enough to know it existed so I made repeated efforts to locate it. I thought I found one at last several years ago in a magazine but when it arrived the poster was not included. Crushing, but I did not blame the seller. The magazine itself is a delight otherwise and contains a short but cute Hayley Mills article. After some searching and patience I found the Hayley Mills poster early last year, sold separate from any magazine. I scanned and filed it until now.

I don't read Japanese so this could be a poster originally sold on it's own, part of some other periodical or fan club collection. The pristine condition has me speculate it spent several decades safe in the pages of a magazine that was properly stored. Hayley is wearing the same dress as on the cover of Eiga Joho and both the magazine and poster are listed as from April 1966. So barring a translation of the Japanese on the poster that would prove otherwise, I believe this is the "bonus" fold out poster of Hayley Mills the issue of Eiga Joho references in the publication notes.


Hayley Mills on the cover of Eiga Joho (April 1966)

Further browsing:Everything Hayley Mills at LTMS
Tumblr search Hayley Mills

4 comments:

  1. I've learned a little Japanese and have some notion of how to look things up. The text at the lower right, 映画の友, means "Eiga no Tomo", a movie magazine. That might mean the poster is actually from Eiga no Tomo, or perhaps Eiga no Tomo and Eiga Joho have some business relationship and use each others' stuff.

    The vertical text at the lower left, 映画の友カラー・スコープ ヘイリー・ミルズ, is "Eiga no Tomo (karascope?) Hayley Mills". I'm not sure what the "karascope" part (カラー・スコープ) means. The dot is a word separator, often used between parts of a foreign name. "カラー" could mean calla, like the lily. Perhaps a Hayley Mills fan can see some connection here that I can't? It's also possible there's another character between "karascope" and "Hayley Mills" - it's obscured by the background.

    Hope this helps...

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  2. it does! thanks. joho is a movie mag so maybe it is a mistranslation?

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    1. Sigh. Still me - Blogspot now refuses to accept my credentials from LJ.

      "Eiga" means movie, so they're both about movies. "Eiga no Tomo" means friend of movies, while "Eiga Jouhou" (映画情報) is more like movie information. ("Jouhou" is like "Joho" but with elongated vowels - the vowel sound is the same.)

      I'm not sure what's going on here; same point in time, so it's not one magazine that changed its name at some point. Maybe both magazines were owned by the same publisher, and it used the images from one photoshoot in two magazines for different markets?

      The stuff at the lower left of the second image, オール芸能総合誌, seems to mean something like All Entertainment Journal of Movie Information. Or so says Google Translate, translating a page that's selling several back issues, but it's not too reliable for kanji in my experience.

      None of which is terribly useful, but I had fun figuring it out :)

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  3. Over the decades looks like seller info got confused and mixed up. A victim of the stripping of pages for resale I guess. But this info is great. Thanks for the detective work

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