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PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION.
Movie Cavalcade has flouted all the rules of publishing. Like its author, it is unconventional. Usually a book of this kind is first published at a price so high that only libraries and a comparatively few people with spare cash in their pockets can buy it. Later, when that public is exhausted — and not before, naturally — a cheap price edition of the book is produced by the publisher. Last of all, perhaps, it vnl\ appear in a paper cover as something to be bought on a station bookstall before a long journey.
Movie Cavalcade has reversed this process, however. Starting life as the first really cheap history of the cinema, in paper cover, at 6d., it rapidly exhausted two large editions. Not only that ; both I and the publisher have been worried ever since by a constant stream of requests for copies.
Spurred on by these letters and by verbal pleas for a more durable stiff-bound edition, I approached the publisher with a view to producing a small, special, illustrated library edition, at a price which would cover these extra refinements.
To my astonishment the publisher, surely the most imderstanding of his race, agreed to my suggestion — no, more than that, he was even enthusiastic about it !
So here it is, the third edition of Movie Cavalcade ; in a new overcoat, but essentially the same as before. I have gone through the M.S. carefully and corrected it here and there (using advice given me in many cases by eagle-eyed and knowledgeable readers, from whom I have had many hundreds of interesting and helpful letters) and added a footnote in order to bring it up-to-date.
To one reader in particular, Mr. Rex Coley, I owe a special debt of gratitude, for he went through the book with a smalltooth comb and a magnifying glass, pointing out printing errors I had not noticed as well as various little slip-ups of which I had been guilty. To Mr. Coley, and to all those other very helpful people, as well as to those who found nothing to grumble at but were embarrassing in their praise, I send my very sincere thanks.
Harrow, Decetnber, 1943.