FIRST CAME THE POSTER, THEN THE MOVIE. COULD THE coffee-table book have been far behind? Several hard-bound tomes about Hindi movie posters have been sliding out of presses and into stores in recent months. These include Bollywood Posters (India Book House) by Jerry Pinto and Sheena Sippy. The 200-plus images in the book are divided by genres and themes such as crime, mythology, romance and fantasy. Bachchanalia: The Films & Memorabilia of Amitabh Bachchan (Osians-Cinefan) is packed with posters of the movies of one of India’s most iconic actors. In Bollywood in Posters (Om Books), Syed Mohammed Muslim Ausaja goes public with his private collection of posters, lobby cards and LP covers.

These books are visual delights and textual disappointments. Apart from assembling posters and running chunky captions alongside the images, none of the books has managed to do what The Art of Bollywood (TASCHEN) does. Edited by Paul Duncan, the book’s highlight isn’t just the eye-catching posters of movies down the ages. Rajesh Devraj’s perceptive essay presents several insights about poster production.

Early posters combined a range of influences, from studio photography to painting. Poster art differed from territory to territory, reflecting the particular tastes of the city or region in which the film was released. Devraj also manages to track down several poster makers, and he establishes that many of them were artists in their own right, leaving their fingerprints on their creations. Nandini Ramnath quizzes Devraj about his accomplishment.

Nandini Ramnath: You have been collecting film posters for years. When did you want to study them?

Rajesh Devraj: My interest in film posters goes back to the time I was working at Channel [V] in the mid-’90s as a promo director. While looking for design references, I discovered Hussainibhai, a poster-seller who had a great collection of Bollywood art. The images I saw opened my eyes to a whole world of movies and eventually led to a show on Indian B-flicks, Toofan TV, which I conceptualised and researched (the series was directed by Pankaj Advani). Apart from film history, Hussainbhai’s collection also provoked my interest in the images themselves.

The turning point came when I saw some rare Art Deco booklets from the ’30s and realised there was a background to this art, which I knew nothing about. Over the years, I looked at as many images as I could find, filling in the gaps in my knowledge. At some point I realised that I had a pretty decent overview of the subject, certainly more comprehensive than anything that had appeared in print at the time, and that’s when the idea of doing a book suggested itself.

N.R: Did your reportage and research throw up new and unusual insights?

R.D: The key insights for me were all related to understanding the various levels at which promotional images were produced in India. If you look at any poster collection, you may find a few originals and many more reprinted rerelease posters and regional variations that recycle the original images. You have to know which is which, if you want to map the history. It’s pointless discussing an image for say, a Guru Dutt film, if you’re not even sure whether the filmmaker commissioned the image himself, or it was produced in Mumbai a decade after his demise when the rights changed hands, or by a regional distributor somewhere. So the key thing for me was to understand how the trade operated.