This book has been in my collection for well over a decade. Until recently, I had only flipped through it to read excerpts from the script.

Two days ago, I was inspired to pull it from my bookshelf and read the surrounding material—preface, foreword, introductions, essays, and reviews—by such notable names as Ralph J. Gleason (renown music critic and founding editor of Rolling Stone magazine), film scholar Richard Brown, Charles Champlin (retired arts editor and columnist from the LA Times), Roger Ebert (practically a household name as film critics go), TIME magazine film critic Richard Corliss, author and historian Aljean Harmetz, and Umberto Eco, professor of semiotics at University of Bologna.

Eco and Corliss provide the most in-depth analyses of Casablanca with Eco delving into the myriad symbolisms and subtexts of the film, while Corliss focuses on the characterizations, relationships, and dialogue.

All of that—in addition to the brilliant script started by Julius and Philip Epstein and finished as breakneck speed by the then untried Howard Koch—and the scattered still shots from the film, make this 50th anniversary edition a treasure for any Casablanca fan and/or film scholar.