History of LAMP

Ownership beginnings

LAMP is owned by Ed and Susan Poole. We started collecting movie posters by accident in the mid 1970s. While at a flea market, we saw a half sheet for Gidget which was one of Sues' favorite movies. We bought the poster, not really realizing what it was. After learning a little, we started looking for posters on other favorites, but there were not very many around. If they had been plentiful, we probably wouldn't have persued it as much, but since they were a little hard to find, posters became a quest.

As we searched more, we started finding theater managers and collectors that wanted to sell groups instead of a single piece. Excited about the prospect of getting a group a lot cheaper, we started buying these collections so we could pick out the ones that we liked.. However, very soon we started getting duplicates and lots of posters that we didn't want so we decided to start selling off our excess posters.

As we started selling, we started learning that some of the items were not what they seemed. Numerous times we had purchased items believing the seller, only to find out a totally different story when we started to sell it. Frustrated at these deceptive sales, we started doing research for ourselves. The oddity was that as we started selling posters and sharing some of the research that we learned, we started finding out that a lot of dealers also had questions. More and more, we started providing information to collectors and dealers.

This slowly evolved into the publishing of our first book in 1997 called Collecting Movie Posters through MacFarland Publishers which was considered the first 'reference' book on the hobby.

At the time of the release of our book, we had a retail store in the largest mall in the area. Our store and inventory grew well until we had approximately 100,000 pieces in our inventory. The mall approached us to move to a larger store, which we did. In 2000, the mall approached to say that a national chain wanted our spot and had offered a 10 year lease. Either match it, or move out. We had no alternative but to close our store.

BIRTH OF LAMP

Sue and I were sitting around moping, when John Kisch asked us to write an online reference guide that was to become a part of his new online website Posterprice.com. Being writers and researchers at heart, we jumped at the chance to write more. After working on the project for a couple of months, we had assembled 200 pages of information and went back to present it to John. Unfortunately, things had changed and John said that he couldn't add that much to the website.. BUT if we would put it online, he would sponsor and promote it.

We decided that we wanted to create a place where collectors could come learn for themselves all different types of information and be able to do any associated research for themselves. We worked another couple of months trying to learn how to layout and create a website. January 15, 2001 LAMP officially opened with a little over 200 pages of information. (It became the archive door on Posterprice.com which linked to LAMP)

Very soon after opening and adding more information we got our first outside sponsor... Bruce Hershenson. So we started with the 2 titans of the hobby as sponsors. We went the rest of the first YEAR without any other sponsors. By the end of 2001, we had 400 pages of information online and were overjoyed to have almost 10,000 visitors a month.

YEAR 2- 2002

During our 2nd year we decided that we wanted to tackle areas that were more difficult and were so large that they needed to be set up as continually growing sections. We created our articles into such areas as Artists and Studios. We started the impossible task of trying to track down ALL NSS numbers of the 44 years of NSS dominance.

We tried to create a manual list of US movies, but after numerous lists and a LOT of time, finally coming to the realization that we needed to create something a lot more massive to control such a huge amount of information. Also during the year, we were approached to release another book for a wider group of collectors.

By the end of our second year, the site had grown to almost 5000 pages of information and we almost quadrupled in traffic to close to 40,000 visitors a month. We had also gained several new sponsors to help offset the expenses of the site.

(During 2002 the following Dealers became Sponsors that are still with us: All-Time Movie Poster, Movie Poster Bargains, Bags Unlimited, Dominique Besson, Heritage Auctions, Hollywood Poster Frames, Movie Collectors World, Movie Art of Austin, Movie Art GmbH, Musicman, Movie Posters, Precision Restoration, Quadbod, Poster Conservation, Studio C.

YEAR 3 - 2003

We expanded our reference section to over 6500 pages. We introduced sections like: Minor Studios and Early Studios, Lithographers and International Artists.

During our 3rd year, we released our 2nd reference book (Learn About Movie Posters) through Iguide Publishers. (Sponsors of our reference book were: Movie Art of Austin, Heritage Auction, Bruce Hershenson, Vintage Film Posters, FilmPosters.net, Cinema Books, Dominique Besson, Bags Unlimited, Fontaine on Linen, Wall2WallMovies.com, Remember When Shop, Precision Restoration, Quadbod, Poster Treasures, Cinema Icons, Studio C, Sothebys, Cine Art Gallery, Reel Poster Gallery, French Movie Posters, Igor Edelman Restoration, Nostalgia Factory, MoviePosters.com, Movie Collectors World, Movie Art Gmbh, Funny Face Productions, Hollywood Canteen, Cinemonde, Bill Cole Enterprises, Hollywood Poster Frames)

We spent 10 months developing a program to list movie titles and cross reference each with our reference site. It is actually 19 databases tied together into one master database. We loaded the lists of movies that we had compiled and set up a demo in August. By the end of the year, we had loaded our new Movie Poster DataBase(MPDB) with 87,000 titles and 13,000 images.

We wanted to extend our concept of a 'safe' area for collectors over into our database. So we created the LAMP Approved Logo and a No Misrepresentation Agreement for dealers to sign, to make sure that dealers that would come on our site would be a reputable dealer. Then we created programming that would allow Reputable Dealers to attach their posters for sale to individual poster images in the MPDB and link them back to their website. Then collectors looking at the images would be able to directly contact a reputable dealer that had the poster for themselves.

By the end of the 3rd year we had tracked approx. 1.2 million visitors for the year.

(During 2003 the following Dealer became Sponsors for our website that are still with us: French Movie Posters, Channing Lyle Thompson, the Cinema Trade, Funny Face Productions, Original Posters, the Poster Mint, Unshredded Nostalgia, Poster Planet, Kinoart, Amazing 3rd Planet.

YEAR 4 - 2004

It was ANOTHER unbelievable expansion year... to highlight some of the major accomplishments:

1. We expanded our reference section to over 7500 pages, added such articles as: Benton Card Co., Legends, Morgan Litho log and dozens of early and minor film companies in the History Section. We also expanded many articles such as: Framing, Black Cast and added hundreds of Artists and NSS numbers.

2. We introduced the concepts of LAMP Approved Online Auction Dealers, Poster Restoration Code and the Poster Restoration Certificate

3. We added over 1500 titles to the Movie Poster DataBase AND added almost 20,000 images.

4. We introduced a variety of new additions to the MPDB which includes showing Directors, Production and Distribution Companies, reissue dates for the film, and aka breakdowns.

5. We created and divided off LAMP-InternationalMoviePosters.com for research on the 45 top poster producing countries around the world and created LAMP-MoviePosterDatabase.com. The framework is fully in place and have started filling in data.

6. We created a network of Dealers Maps for each state in the US AND all 45 countries to show a wide variety of information for collectors. This framework would allow us to start attaching information within each state or country such as Museums, poster exhibits, locations of LAMP dealers, etc.

We tracked approx. 1.6 million visitors to LAMP from over 100 different countries..

(During 2004 the following Dealer became Sponsors for our website that are still with us: Cinemasterpieces, Film Art Gallery, Miscellaneous Man, Posterworld (Paul Hein), Intemporel, Spotlight Displays, Big Pix, ZW Posters.

YEAR 5 - 2005

The first quarter of the 5th year started off with a BANG..

We had already modified the MPDB to breakoff the pages to allow us to show more posters on a title without slowing down the page.

Because of the new International Section.. we loaded original movie titles from European countries into the MPDB. We grew to over 101,000 titles and had over 35,000 images in the MPDB.

We introduced a new GENERIC Section. which is basically 6 new databases tied together to partially interlock with the MPDB. These new sections created a holding place to let our dealers list their entire inventory into a waiting area of the MPDB. This lets collectors know what they have even though it's not pictured yet.

This expansion ALSO allowed a dealer to attach ANY movie oriented item... such as trailers, VHS tapes, clothing, toys.... ANY movie oriented item... We signed our first video and DVD dealers....

JULY 4th, we installed our final structure (hopefully) to allow growth and expansion for many years to come.

We divided LAMP into 7 websites....

LAMP-Main
LAMP-MoviePosterDataBase
LAMP-InternationalMoviePosters
LAMP-MovieStudioHistory
LAMP-MoviePosterArtists
LAMP-MovieVideoDataBase
LearnAboutMilitaryPosters

During the summer, we had extensive growth in the new Generic Section and by August we had matched the number of for sale that were in the regular Archive Section (pictured). This brought the For Sale total to over 25,000 in our database.

The last week of August brought Hurricane Katrina, which hit the area that we live. We evacuated and stayed in a hotel in Austin, Texas for a month until we could move closer to our damaged home. We were finally able to move back into our home on November 18th. Even though we were not able to do any work on LAMP, the websites continued to operate normally. The only difference was that we were not able to add or update the sites.

December brought a little expansion and more problems. We found out that with the last expansion, we had become too large for our current host and had to look for new hosting facilities.

So a lot of progress was made during this past year, but also a lot of delays and problems. We ended 2005 with 118,170 movie titles listed, 43,383 images online and over 30,000 posters for sale. To make it worse, by the end of the year, we lost a dozen sponsors.

(During 2005 the following Dealer became Sponsors that are still with us: Weatherking, Yazoo Mills, Sinister Cinema, Movie Poster Service, Thanhouser.

YEAR 6 - 2006

We started off the year in a little chaos, trying to recuperate from moving the sites AND Hurricane Katrina, BUT traffic on the sites continued to grow. We started moving the site and found that they didn't have all the amenities that we needed so we had to stop and find another host. We finally found one with moved to our new location with 80 gigabytes of online space. We finished the actual move of LAMP on January 12th. We normally would have been celebrating our 5th anniversary but we put if off until March 1. From Jan. 12th until Feb 11th we had a little over 257,000 visitors, so we were extremely happy that growth continued in spite of the move.

For our 5th anniversary, we added a new variety of icons to our database to help in the initial search. We initially had the icon to show when we had poster images. We added icons to show.. posters for sale in the archive, posters for sale not pictured, commercials for sale, videos for sale, dvds for sale, electronics for sale, toys for sale and novelties for sale.

We struggled with fighting insurance companies and contractors on our house, but actually used LAMP as a type of getaway. So we added 1000s of images and numerous articles. Doing research for LAMP became our therapy.

During the end of 2006, we started a new massive project we named the Dealers Market. This project is to have a massive number of posters both for sale AND auction results to give an accurate indication of the market.

(During 2006 the following Dealer became Sponsors that are still with us: L'Imagerie Gallery, Posteropolis, Tough Guys, Cinema Retro.

YEAR 7 - 2007

Year 7 was extremely difficult for us. With so much personal loss from Hurricane Katrina, we had battled continuously during 2006 with the insurance companies and contractors. 2007 was a continuation of that battle. We finally gave up and settled for partial restoration of our house with the remaining of the repairs to be done a little at a time out of our pocket.

Besides the battles at home, we encoutered a mass amount of information theft from our website. This wound up in a legal battle trying to secure LAMP. Upon stopping the bulk theft, we tried to formally copyright the website, only to find out that it was too large to copyright. We were instructed to break the site into smaller pieces, which is why we broke off the individual countries and some sections. Then finally in May we officially became incorporated as Learn About Network, L.L.C.

In January, 2007, we released a new 800 page book from our Dealers Market project containing 60,000 posters with prices and conditions for sale by LAMP Dealers. This was a test in written form and the foundation for the online version. The size alone indicates that this has to continue as an online version for it would be too costly of a set of books to continue printing. We presented the Dealers Market book at the shows. (Sponsors of our Dealers Market book were: Amazing 3rd Planet, Big Pix, Channing Lyle Thomson, CineMasterpieces, Dominique Besson, ds|onesheets, emovieposter.com, Film Art Gallery, French Movie Posters, Harry Keaton's, Intemporel, Kinoart, Klauer *Kollectibles, L'Imagerie Gallery, Linders Auctions, Miscellaneous Man, Movie Art of Austin, Movie Art GmbH, MoviePosters.com, Movie Poster Service, Original Poster, Posteropolis, PosterPlanet.net, Posterworld, Quadbod, Thanhouser, the Cinema Trade, the Poster Mint, Tough Guys, Unshredded Nostalgia, Weatherking, ZW Movie Posters, Funny Face, Poster Conservation, Poster Science, Precision Restoration, Studio C, Bags Unlimited, Hollywood Poster Frames, Spotlight Displays, Yazoo Mills, Heritage Auction, Movie Collectors World, Sinister Cinema)

Also during the first of the year, we wanted to reach out to collectors more and decided to try some conventions. We did 2 conventions where we set up and demostrated LAMP (Feb. in L.A. and May at Cinevent). Both were extremely successful and showed us several areas that we thought needed addressing. Main neglected issues we found were: information on stills, information on international posters, large images, and a reliable price guide.

We continued breaking apart and expanding the country sites, working on the online Dealers Market project and added a new print project, US Movie Studio Production Codes, which we learned from the shows was an area with no information available. We believe the industry needs to do more research and hopefully this would spearhead it. We released the Production Codes book in September and received rave reviews from stills dealers. (Sponsors of our reference book were: French Movie Posters, All Time Movie Posters, Movie Poster Bargains, Ashfault's Classic Movies, Bags Unlimited, Big Pix, emovieposter.com, Channing Lyle Thomson, Intemporel, Cinemagic, Cinema Retro, Cinemasterpieces, Cinevent, Comic-Art Gallery, Czech Film Posters, Dominique Besson, Erdie Industries, Film Art Gallery, Funny Face Productions, Heritge Auction, Hollywood Poster Frames, Julien's Auctions, Kinoart, L'Imagerie Gallery, Memorabilia Mine, Miscellaneous Man, Move Art GmbH, Movie Art of Austin, Movie Collectors World, Movie Poster Bid, Movie Poster Service, Movieposters.com, MusicMan, Original Posters, Poster Conservation, Poster Science, Posteropolis, Poster Planet, Posterworld, Precision Restoration, Quadbod, Sinister Cinema, Spotlight Displays, Studio C, Thanhouser, the Cinema Trade, the Poster Mint, Tough Guys, Unshredded Nostalgia, Vintage Movie Memorabilia, Weatherking, Yazoo Mills, Z W Movie Posters)

Also our shining spot in September was the birth of our grand daughter Brook.

During the summer, we had several negative encounters with Wikipedia with people continually stealing our information and putting it on Wikipedia. This led to the decision to create a Members area that could be protected and where more advanced information could be safely placed online and shared with LAMP Members and Sponsors. We also created the LAMP Navigator to help dealers and collectors find what they are looking for easier. AND we institued a program in our archive for larger images and a new system for reporting FAKES.

The end of the year had us doing programming to finish the online Dealers Market, membership area and we added a new project, a book about International Movie Posters, with extensive breakdown on 28 countries.

(During 2007 the following Dealer became Sponsors that are still with us: C V Treasures, Comic-art Gallery, Movie Poster Bid, A Movie Masterpiece, Memorabilia Mine, Posterscience, Cinemagic, Czech Film Posters, Erdie Industries, Ashfault's Classic, Vintage Movie Memorabilia.

YEAR 8 - 2008

As 2008 starts, we have a huge amount of additions for our 7th anniversary online, the Collecting International Movie Posters book in the process of being released and 3 shows already booked. It looks like the beginning of a massive expansion year..... For our Anniversary, here is a list of where we stand - By the Numbers.

We have also instituted new Video Tutorials to help everyone find information easier.

(During 2008 the following Dealer became Sponsors that are still with us: Movie Posters Inc.,