Arrow Booklets: An International Tragedy

[Ovader]

Received "Removal of Your Garments For Your Killer" with no booklet from Unobstructed View today.

[L.A.]

The Arrow Christmas Sale:

Manon with booklet
Dream Demon with booklet and slipcover

[AidanKing]

'Black Test Car', ordered from the current sale, came with a booklet, which contains an interesting article on the Black films series. The producer of the set was James Flower: I hope he is going to be producing the next two Masumura releases.

[Grand Wazoo]

'Black Test Car', ordered from the current sale, came with a booklet, which contains an interesting article on the Black films series. The producer of the set was James Flower: I hope he is going to be producing the next two Masumura releases.

Hopefully three, providing I can will Red Angel into existence.

[AidanKing]

I would also like to see 'A Wife Confesses', but I think that might have been more likely as an Arrow Academy release.

[Telstar]

Guess I've been lucky so far, but after amassing way too many Arrow titles over the past decade I finally received my first one to come without a booklet -- Hagazussa.
So can anyone fill me in on what I'm missing?

[L.A.]

Guess I've been lucky so far, but after amassing way too many Arrow titles over the past decade I finally received my first one to come without a booklet -- Hagazussa.
So can anyone fill me in on what I'm missing?

If I recall, besides the booklet the limited edition also included a soundtrack CD and a poster.

[Telstar]

Wasn't particularly interested in the soundtrack cd or poster but if the Hagazussa booklet is a good read I'm gonna be upset.

[Finch]

From the current sale, The Possessed and Hold Back The Dawn did not come with a booklet; Hotel Du Nord did.

[senseabove]

Unexpectedly, since multiple people reported bookless copies a year ago, my copy of Irma Vep from the Easter Carnage sale came with a booklet.

[JamesF]

'Black Test Car', ordered from the current sale, came with a booklet, which contains an interesting article on the Black films series. The producer of the set was James Flower: I hope he is going to be producing the next two Masumura releases.

Glad you enjoyed the booklet! Not me, but both Masumuras are being overseen by a recent addition to the Arrow producing team, Jasper Sharp, who’s forgotten more about Japanese cinema than I’ll ever learn. They’re in very safe hands.

[AidanKing]

Jasper Sharp joining the team is indeed excellent news. His articles for Midnight Eye and Sight and Sound have always been very interesting and informative. Hopefully, this bodes well for more Japanese films to be released. Some more Masumura would be welcome and I wonder whether Arrow might consider some of the Ichikawa films that have been released in Japan, but which the BFI didn't release along with An Actor's Revenge: I think Conflagration was one of these.

[MichaelB]

Very much seconded - with every imaginable respect to the rest of the Arrow team, if I had to choose between any of them or Jasper to oversee a Japanese release, it wouldn't be much of a head-scratcher.

[therewillbeblus]

'Black Test Car', ordered from the current sale, came with a booklet, which contains an interesting article on the Black films series. The producer of the set was James Flower: I hope he is going to be producing the next two Masumura releases.

Ordered this separately from the sale, through Amazon, and it still came with a booklet- happy to report a good track record for the black test car

[esl]

Jasper Sharp joining the team is indeed excellent news. His articles for Midnight Eye and Sight and Sound have always been very interesting and informative. Hopefully, this bodes well for more Japanese films to be released. Some more Masumura would be welcome and I wonder whether Arrow might consider some of the Ichikawa films that have been released in Japan, but which the BFI didn't release along with An Actor's Revenge: I think Conflagration was one of these.

With the Hiroshi Shimizu retrospective (of 50! films) currently happening in Paris, I hope Arrow considers doing a set of some of his films not yet released commercially; Children of the Beehive, Children and the Great Buddha, Story of Jiro to name just a few.

[esl]

Received yesterday Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji with booklet from Amazon.

[Ovader]

Received today from Deep Discount Requiescant (new version: A0102586597-B911) with a booklet! Not too bad from a 2015 release.

[swo17]

Received today from Deep Discount Requiescant (new version: A0102586597-B911) with a booklet! Not too bad from a 2015 release.

Your post prompted me to buy this but I think it was released before The Event. Note that the back cover advertises a booklet, which they don't do anymore even for first pressings

[Boosmahn]

From Arrow's store, Smash Palace, [REC], and Empathy, Inc. included booklets. (Smash Palace was released over three years ago, so I'm guessing that hasn't been a big seller.) The rest did not, but the absences of booklets from Gas Food Lodging and Double Face were especially surprising/disappointing.

[Adam X]

I just came across what I'm pretty sure is a new/reworded entry in Arrow's website FAQ:

PRODUCTS/Do all your titles have booklets?
Excluding limited editions, booklets will be included with applicable titles for the first 4 months after release.

[tenia]

I'm surprised they would settle for a given duration. Except by strictly getting the unsold stock back after 4 months to render them booklet-less, I'd suppose it'd be much easier to say "1st pressing of usually x copies" or explain the duration is on average but may vary based on how quickly a release is selling.

[Adam X]

Well, they've shown no interest in providing transparency over even how many copies of most of their Limited Edition titles are being printed, so I can't see them putting a number on it. I'd imagine that it's something like they're not going to repress copies with the booklet after that 4 month window.

Of course, who's to say "applicable titles" is referring to every non-limited AV release. At least it's a little more reassuring than the general "just pre-order everything individually so you don't miss out" approach they've held in recent years.

[rapta]

I imagine they gauge booklet printing on how popular a title is, or how integral they may feel the written material is for that release, so there may be longer booklet runs on Academy titles for example but maybe they change it for every release. It'd be better if they were a bit more transparent, like BFI have been doing, by saying in the specs for each release that the booklet is limited to the first 2000/3000/4000 copies.

I have been prioritising titles I want the most and pre-ordering those, and generally waiting for a sale for other titles. I've been lucky so far but there have been a few where the booklet seems to have disappeared ridiculously quickly (Man of a Thousand Faces is a good example of that, I find it hard to believe the first print-run sold out in a few months).

[tenia]

What I meant is that industrially speaking, it's just so much easier to print a given quantity rather than trying to gauge a time window within which the quantity will sell out, hence x months of availability.

And Arrow used to say explicitly every of their LE batch sizes (I have a table full of them). It's never been really the case for non-LE but it was the case for LE. I don't see why, since they made their non-LE booklets not unlimited anymore, they couldn't say "this 1st pressing is x copies". I mean : it is produced in such a fashion. They do know how big their 1st pressing is.

Not that I care myself : I do think Arrow's non-LE booklet have dropped significantly in interest quite some time ago, but from a pure logistic aspect, orienting the limit this way is strange to me.

[Adam X]

For anyone who missed the original edition, the complete Dekalog book is now available to download from Arrow's site.