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Restoration can improve the looks of most posters, but there are limits to what can be achieved. If a poster has a hole in it, it has a hole it. You can cosmetize that defect, but no true restoration here is possible. But if a poster has border tears, separations, or holes where the paper has been bent back, so that, in effect, there is a semicircular tear, a restoration is possible. There are some great posters of which the only known copy or copies are restorations. Thus there is a legitimate time and place for restoration. But, restoration is costly and so restoring a poster must be cost effective to be considered. A word of warning: not everyone who says he does restoration is necessarily good at it. You get what you pay for, and fees for restoration can run from the bargain basement to very, very, expensive. Never entrust a valuable poster to anyone for restoration unless you have made an effort to find out whether the restorer knows what they are doing. Undoing a bad restoration is triply expensive and sometimes impossible. Get some knowledge yourself and get a good recommendation. Here again, knowing a reliable dealer can help.
Notes on scarcity.
There are millions of movie posters out there, but nevertheless, in relation to the potential market for them, they are scarce. (Some are actually rare. Rare means few known copies) This and the fact that there is a real market for them makes them true collectibles.
Movie posters were never intended for distribution to the general public. They were intended to go the exhibitors where the general public would see them and be moved to see the films they advertised. That's all. Their desirability as collector's items has ever been enhanced by this one simple fact: they were not printed and sold to the public at large. Unlike many other areas of paper collectibles which were originally intended for mass consumption, movie posters were not. However many copies of these posters on a given film were printed throughout the decades, it is certain that the numbers were small compared with they might have been if they had been destined for the public at large.
Exactly how many one sheets? How many three sheets, etc? Impossible to say, with absolute accuracy. This would have varied with the film and its anticipated distribution. In general, there were fewer of the larger posters printed than smaller ones. (This gives birth to the theory that a three sheet should be worth so many times the value of a one sheet, and a six sheet twice the value of a three sheet etc. This is a theory to which I do not personally subscribe- certainly not in every case. You may take this into account, but I think we must look more to the merits of a given poster in a given size to determine it's desirability. Not merely it's size and not it's scarcity. Factors such as these will contribute to driving the desirability and value (and thus the price) of a poster, but not determine them.) Printing runs for every size poster were, indeed, limited. A specified number of posters in each size were ordered to be printed for the exchanges when a film was readied for it's initial release. Rarely were posters reprinted unless a film was reissued.
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