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Inside Love Me Tender

By ElvisNews.com/ Kees, October 23, 2008 | Book

Ger Rijff was so kind to send us a copy of “Inside Love Me Tender”, the latest book he contributed to. Supposedly his last contribution to my bookshelf, but fortunately news broke he will contribute – a little – to a sixties book “Inside Blue Hawaii”.

Design

The book originally comes in a box with a DVD, a vinyl single and some other memorabilia, but Ger forgot to include those in the package ? To be honest, I don’t really miss those, as the book is the most important item and those boxes take up way too much space.
The design was done by Kenneth Dokkeberg from Norway and he did a great job. Every volume in this “Inside” series looks better. The part of the book that deals with the movie does remind me a bit of Ger’s original designs while the memorabilia sections has a scrapbook-like design that perfectly fits the content.

Content

The book is divided in various sections. Starting off with the well written story how the movie became to be and Elvis scored his first film-role we move over to Elvis arriving in Hollywood, on the set, in the studio on television (debuting on Sullivan’s TV Show) to the photo studio. The main story is illustrated with memories from people who were there at the time, with Elvis on the set or out on a dates like June Juanico, Hal Wallis and Nathalie Wood. Funny to see casual shots of Elvis in which he wears the same clothes as later or before for the publicity photo shoots. So many pictures made just for this movie and the soundtrack made it to the cover of albums in my collection.

The second part of the book is for moviememorabelia and old records from around the globe. Personally I always like the memorabilia sections in these kinds of books as those items as they paint a picture of times gone by. All the itmes belonging together are presented as they should. So much material survived the fifty years since they were made, from big posters to acetates and small paper clippings from newspapers. The designer made one error, the Australian and Japanese EP are the same image.
For me the book might been twice this size so the pictures and memorabilia could be presented in bigger sizes. I do wonder will that kind of memorabilia of today’s artists I see in the newspapers and magzines still be available fifty years from now?

Conclusion

The definitive book on this movie; the complete story, a lot of details and memories, illustrated with shots from the movie, on and off the set, in the movie, television and recording studio and a lot of memorabilia. Bring on the next installment in this series.

It would be nice if the authors of this series would team up with the movie-studio and the Follow That Dream label to produce a really definitive set on these movies.

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Greg Nolan wrote on November 12, 2008
Thanks for the review, Kees. And thanks to Ger Rijff for continuing to grace the Elvis world with his presence -long after he's sworn it off with good reason! If it's a Rijff -related project, it's gotta be good! I look forward to picking up INSIDE LOVE ME TENDER. I bought the INSIDE GI BLUES sometime ago and while I admit I haven't spent a lot of time with it, I think the concept of the INSIDE books is fantastic. The only thing is that it's tough to keep up with the bonanza of releases on CD - but fans had better not miss out on these great "INSIDE" Elvis book projects. I'll be tracking one down soon!