I had the pleasure of picking up this very rare photo of Mary Blair and Kay Kamen (left) on HowardLowery.com last week and had to share it with all of you.

Found recently on the internet: Actress Thelma Todd and Kay Kamen.

Among various Kamen-related papers uncovered recently was this fascinating letterhead from the English Mickey Mouse Ltd. (May 1937). What makes this document particularly interesting for me is that along with George Kamen (Kay's nephew) who is listed as Managing Director, we also learn the name of another officer, Thomas Swan, and confirm that William B. Levy was still an acting director of the company at the time. The address of the UK office is also confirmed on this document. Many elements which help connect some of the dots. More on this at a later date.

This just in from Gunnar Andreassen:

[If you are not aware of it already: An item for sale at Heritage now, that might interest you: A Roy Disney Signed Contract Regarding Merchandising, 1932 with Kay Kamen, three of totally 12 pages are found in the description.]

This is an incredibly important piece of Disneyana / Disney history: The first contract signed between Disney and Kamen. This also means that the date of the signature of the contract mentioned in my article in the magazine Twenty-Three (July 1, 1932) is off by two days, since the contract is actually dated June 29, 1932.

I have been conducting some research about the life of Kay Kamen recently, for reasons which will become obvious in a few weeks.

One of the elements, which is now finally confirmed is Kay's exact birth date and name at birth, two elements which varied widely on official records, and which we were only able to confirm thanks to the help of Joe Campana, and to the efforts of Charles Kenny who went all the way to the Baltimore Archives to dig up Kay's birth certificate.

While working on this project, I stumbled upona few visual documents which are worth sharing here. I wish to thank Michael Barrier for his help when it came to acquiring copies of them.

We alll knew that Kamen had released a promotional magazine named The Boys Outfitter, when he was still involved with the Kamen-Blair venture, which he started with Streeter Blair in 1926 (and would leave in 1933).

What we did not know is that he also launched several other promotional magazines which would later inspire the promotional Mickey Mouse Magazine.

You can see two of these promotional magazines below.

And we now finally know the name of the plush doll character on the cover of the first Mickey Mouse Magazine!

I mentioned yesterday that the first thing I did when receiving Neal Gabler's book about Walt was check the bibliography. One of the articles I had never heard about is actually available online. Called The Master of Marketing, it's an amazingly complete article about Kay Kamen. A great read.