Hello, All:
First of all, thank you, Bruce, for reporting this.
I am greatly saddened to hear of Richard Allen’s death. He was a
wonderful man, and he was so kind to me in the beginning days of my
career selling film posters. He was encouraging. He genuinely loved
film posters, and your assessment of his influence on the hobby is
spot-on. The book he created with Stephen Rebello is a wonderful book,
and I’m sure that it helped to spawn the many books that now exist
on the subject, some of which are quite fine, but none better than
REEL ART.
You are quite right about his personality, which was warm, friendly,
inviting, curious, genial, patient.
I was lucky to have known him. My dad died when he was 97 also, and I
can tell you that that in itself is an accomplishment.
Rest In Peace, Richard.
Kind Regards to all on this list, and to you, Bruce,
Kirby McDaniel
MovieArt Austin
On Oct 1, 2018, at 1:35 PM, Bruce Hershenson
<brucehershen...@gmail.com> wrote:
It is with much sadness that I report that the world's foremost
movie poster collector, Richard Carson Allen, passed away on
September 19th. He was 97 years old, and he lived a remarkably full
life, both personally and professionally. You can read much about
him here:
HTTPS://OBITUARIES.PRESSHERALD.COM/OBITUARIES/MAINETODAY-PRESSHERALD/OBITUARY.ASPX?N=RICHARD-CARSON-ALLEN&PID=190354169
[1]
I first learned of Richard Allen in 1988 when I saw the massive
coffee table book he had just co-authored with Stephen Rebello, REEL
ART. GREAT POSTERS FROM THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE SILVER SCREEN. In the
mid-1980s I resumed collecting movie posters (after having stopped
for a decade), and it was this amazing book that propelled my
collecting into a much higher gear (and I have heard the same from
many, many, other collectors over the years since).
After buying the book, I very much wanted to meet Mr. Allen in
person, and I did so the following year (legendary movie poster
dealer Jose Ma Carpio set it up). Upon meeting Richard (as he
insisted I call him!), I was at once struck by how humble he was, in
spite of his many business accomplishments. And I also met his
wonderful (and very supportive) wife, Barbara, whom he had married
in 1943, and who was by his side when he passed away, after a 75
year marriage and three children.
Over the next few years we had many business dealings, with my first
auctioning much of his remarkable collection, and later we
co-authored a large number of movie poster books, and later still we
formed a partnership in leasing images of classic movie posters (the
Hershenson/Allen Archive), and through it all, we never had a single
disagreement.
I have accomplished much during my career in the movie poster hobby,
and whenever people ask me how I did it, I remember the words of
Isaac Newton, who said, "If I have seen further it is by standing on
the shoulders of giants", and I say that in my case, "If I have done
more in this hobby than others, it is by standing on the shoulders
of Richard Allen"!
Incidentally, Richard did not come first come into the movie poster
hobby around the time of Reel Art. Growing up in Montclair New
Jersey, he would attend great 1930s movies, and sometimes he asked
the theater for a poster from a particular favorite, and he still
had those when I visited him for the first time in 1989! When
dealers first appeared on the collecting scene in the 1960s and
1970s, Richard was one of their best customers, searching out the
finest posters from the finest movies. This is why Reel Art
contained the most amazing assemblage of movie posters ever seen,
because the collection had been formed over many decades.
It is impossible to overstate how influential Richard's book, Reel
Art, has been on the movie collecting hobby. It was the first to
treat them as an art form rather than a collectible, and it is no
coincidence that less than two years after the publication of this
book the world's foremost auction houses were regularly holding
major movie poster auctions, and that this little hobby grew from a
few hundred people to many thousands. And for decades after its
publication, Richard remained a "good will ambassador" for the
hobby, traveling all over the country, telling everyone he could
about this wonderful hobby.
So thank you very, very much Richard, for all you did for the movie
poster collecting hobby. You absolutely were the world's number one
movie poster collector, and every collector the world over owes you
a great debt of gratitude for all you did for our hobby!
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Links:
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