Intimate And Rare

It is already "an oldie", this 1997-release. "Memories & Photos from the personal collection of Joe Esposito" is the subtitle of the book, and it sure looks promising. The book is a glossy one, in good print and the pictures are very clear. A little minus is the setting of the introducing text for the chapters. It is in white on black, and because of the thin font they used it is pretty hard to read. Okay so far the lay-out, now it's time for the content.

The book is divided in several chapters, each of them covering a theme. Because of this there is no particular chronological order in the book.

After the introduction we have a chapter about the movies. Roughly from Flaming Star to That's the Way It Is we get mainly behind the scenes shots, with every now and then a picture from a movie itself. Overall the collection of movie pictures is funny and displays a lot of humour that seemed to be all around during the Hollywood years. An eye-catcher is a big error on the text of one of the pictures. A picture that is obvious from The Trouble with Girls is described as "On the set of Clambake". Of course it is understandable that Joe mixed something up (especially on the movies), but with an editorial check it should have been found, especially because a couple of pages later is another picture of "The Trouble", this time dated well.

After the movies we get a section with celebrities. A lot of those pictures are know to the fans by now and can even be found on the Internet. Maybe with Joe's book as original source. Some of the people we saw pass: Tom Jones (again with a wrong date, but this time only a typo), Bobby Darin, Paul Anka, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Roy Hamilton and Joe Esposito (several times).

The celebrities are followed by THE Wedding, with lots of pictures, of course a lot of known ones, but also bunches of unknown. A couple of (too) short chapters about the Las Vegas comeback, the Las Vegas Press Conference and the Houston Astrodome shows are followed by another somewhat larger chapter: Karate. The Madison Square Garden (Press Conference) and Aloha chapters are closing the series of short chapters.

Then it is time for the two most interesting chapters of the book. First we get one filled with candids. Those kind of chapters are always too short, so we won't complain about it. The book closes with a chapter with vacation-pictures. Some are very rare (or were very rare before the Internet) and are really a joy to view!

For the most fans this book is about a must. It is a pity that it is only 100 pages. Joe Esposito did some nice work with "giving" this to the fans, and at least he never fails to see what it was all about: Elvis. He shows a lot of affection and several times he states that he owes "everything" to our man.