I've never posted any of my acquisitions before but I thought this poster and the circumstances around it were worth sharing.
A few months ago, my girlfriend, who has little interest in posters but is nice enough to occasionally enquire about my collecting habit, asked what my most sought after poster was. I told her, top of the list, has to be the Japanese poster for David Cronenberg's Spider, but that it's a pretty hard one to find. Fast forward to the other day, my birthday, and my girlfriend hands me a tube. Well, you can guess what was inside it. She spent quite some time fruitlessly tracking down the poster (welcome to my world...) before asking her Japanese co-worker if he could help. He found one on a Japanese auction site and then kept checking with her if she was sure she wanted to buy a used poster for her boyfriend, thinking it was a weird thing to do. Luckily for me, she reassured him. The seller wouldn't ship outside of Japan so the co-worker had to get it shipped to his sister in Japan who sent it to the UK, where I am based. Anyway, I give the preamble because I can't quite believe the trouble she took to indulge me. She even felt bad that she'd been able to find it where I had failed!
And here is the poster. It's B1 size and rolled. I sent some pics to a super helpful APF member (he knows who he is -- thanks again) to get their view on whether it's the real deal or a repro, and he seemed pretty sure it's genuine. It measures up correctly. And frankly, even if it turns out to be a fake, I don't really care because a) it's a great image and, more importantly, b) as the old saying goes, it's the thought that counts.
