A Glittering Prize

I recently had the opportunity to visit one of the greatest film book publishers in the world: Glittering Images in Florence, Italy! (note: the Glittering Images website seems to be offline at the moment) This outfit produces amazingly colorful and well-researched tomes on cult-films and related topics, all lavishly illustrated with rare posters, magazine covers and even specially commissioned comics! Most helpfully, despite being Italian in origin all of them contain parallel text in English! Among my favorites are their books on Jess Franco, Japanese "pink" horror, sexploitation filmmakers (including David Friedman) and classic Italian horror. They have also produced cross-over books on photo comics, racy magazines, and an extensive line of classic erotica. I was welcomed by Stefano Piselli, one of the founders, who has co-edited or written many of their books.

The combined office/warehouse houses a treasure trove of memorabilia, from original cover paintings and rare books to obscure Super 8 movies...




...and of course a full range of Glittering Images books!



After chatting with Stefano and picking out some choice books for purchase, I also got a sneak peak at their up-coming book on Italian Giallos - this could be one of their best books yet!

Black Dynamite

Here are a few posters with Pam Grier, the Blaxploitation starlet who virtually defined the genre in a set of Jack Hill-directed revenge movies - Coffy and Foxy Brown. The first two posters are from the Swedish run, where each film was predictably cut to ribbons by the censors, and in the case of Coffy, originally banned outright - something the exhibitors made sure to mention on the posters!



Finally here we have the spectacular Italian manifestos for Coffy and The Big Doll House, the latter a sleazy women-in-prison epic from the Hill/Grier team!