By the time Les Adams arrived in Eastland, Texas, in the 1960s, he was about 50 years late for the town’s oil boom. But Adams came searching for another kind of treasure. He had received a tip from his former boss at a bowling alley, a politician named Preston Smith, that a printing company in Eastland was changing up its business. For years it had been a major source of promotional materials for the movie industry, but it was moving on to a new market in restaurant menus. The company, Smith said, had some leftover pressbooks—brochures created by film distributors to market new flicks—that might interest Adams. Bearing a handwritten note from Smith, Adams found the owner, Victor Cornelius, at his office on Main Street. “I still don’t know what Preston told Victor,” Adams told me. “But I do know I ended up getting the pressbooks. He had them upstairs in a blocked-off room—shelves and shelves. It started in 1930, in alphabetical order.” Adams borrowed a pick-up truck and made five trips, ferrying three decades of film history to his own collection of memorabilia back in Lubbock, about a four-hour drive away. “I was buried in paper,” he recalled.
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