From Vanity Fair’s website, an amazing slide show of lobby cards—”the gorgeous promotional posters that were a common sight in movie theaters from the early 20th century through the 1960s.” They’re from the collection of the late screenwriter Leonard Schrader, the brother of screenwriter-director Paul Schrader.

The slide show itself is here; Peter Biskind’s introductory essay is here.

To read more about this incredible trove of Hollywood ephemera, visit the collection’s official site.

Via BibliOdyssey, which is bursting with gorgeous graphical stuff, I just discovered Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie, an admirably geeky blog devoted to the history of the bookplate. As the American Society of Bookplate Collectors and Designers explains,

Since the fifteenth century, distinguished artists and their patrons have given serious attention to this art form. It represents a miniature art developed to adorn books and a convenient, individualized way for the book’s owner to be identified. The bookplate, or ex libris, is a label placed on the inside of the front cover of a book.

These celebrity bookplates are apparently from the blogger’s personal collection:

Go here for more of this blogger’s celebrity bookplates.

The website of the Los Angeles-based ReadInk Books contains a bunch of other Hollywood bookplates, along with some historical background about each.

In the Talk of the Town section of this week’s New Yorker, the always sensible Daniel Radosh debunks the oft-parroted claim that the Academy Awards broadcast is seen by a billion people each year:

But the worldwide audience for the Oscars isn’t even close to a billion, as a little common sense makes plain. In the United States, 43.5 million people watched the show last year. That’s a lot, but it’s 956.5 million short of a billion. Can the show really pick up that many viewers in countries that most of the films and people being honored are not from, and where the speeches are in a language that most of the population does not speak?