Apologies in advance if this post ends up being a bit like the parish newsletter today, but there are a few things I’d to tell you about, even though they aren’t entirely related. So bear with me, and the flower rota will be at the end.
Firstly and also excitingly, the BPMA have also got in contact with Pieter Huveneers, and he is going to answer some questions on their blog in January. So if there’s anything you’d like to ask him about poster design, the GPO or being a design guru in Australia, now is your chance. All the details are on their blog.
The artwork above with the bite taken out of it is from their collections, as is the poster below.
This is of course a poster announcing the arrival of a medium – television – which would in the end kill the poster itself stone dead. Still, Huveneers wasn’t to know.
While I’m on the subject of the BPMA, they are once again selling lovely poster Christmas cards, including this lovely Hass.
But there are a whole range of designs, quite a few of which have already featured on Quad Royal before now, and you may find them here.
Most of the rest of our parish consists, as ever, of eBay. In summary, there are some nice posters out there; however people mostly want rather larger sums of money for them than we – along with I suspect most of the rest of the parishioners – are prepared to pay. With that in mind, here’s the best of the bunch.
Your starter is a lovely Dorrit Dekk, mounted on linen too. Starting price, £224-ish (it’s in America), although it doesn’t deserve that on the grounds of the foreshortened photography alone.
Another photography award goes to the seller of this Pye Radio poster, who has managed to photograph it looking like a giant billboard on the A4.
It is in fact only 74cm long, which probably also means that £49.99 is a fairly optimistic valuation.
All of which means that when both the above Guinness posters start at a slightly more reasonable £99, I am pleasantly surprised. The top one is, I think, by R Peppe and dates from 1962, although the listing doesn’t tell you any of that. The other one I have never seen before in my life, and all I can find out is that it might be by someone called E Hanna, so if anyone can enlighten me further about it, please do. Rather good, though, don’t you think?
Cheaper, and possibly even more fantastic still, are these two Australian emigration posters.
The listing (which in turn wins a prize for being one of the longest I have ever encountered) describes them as being possibly the work of Douglas Annand. A brief trawl through google leaves me unconvinced, but he did do this poster.
And also these rather great P&O Menu cards too (via this Australian blog).
Regardless of whether he did those other two posters, they are very still good. Even better, both auctions started at a thoroughly reasonable £9.99, but with bids already in I am expecting them to go higher.
Digression over, I can also tell you that it is possible to buy expensive posters in places other than eBay.
This GPO poster is up for auction by Poster Auctions International with an estimate of $400-600. I’m usually quite fond of this series of posters, but this one has to be one of the least appealing. So have this one as a palate cleanser instead.
There that’s better, isn’t it. All that remains a reminder that the Church Christmas Fair is this Saturday and Holy Communion is at the usual time of 11.30 on Sunday. See you all then.
I know nothing of an E. Hanna, but I wonder if your mystery Guinness poster is by J. Hanna, an Australian who came over to the UK in the late 40s & worked here as a commercial artist until 1962, when he seems to disappear from view (a kind of Huveneers in reverse!). He is best known for his whimsical Country Fair magazine covers, of which there is a nice set on Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/31211093@N08/sets/72157626944590216/
I recently acquired a rather good P&O menu by him, which shows him working in a vein much closer to the Guinness poster. There is a certain stylistic affinity between the menu merman & the happy chappie with the pint in his hand!
His material is generally signed simply ‘Hanna’
The ‘J’ is for John, btw!
While I rather like the look of J Hanna and his Country Fair magazines, I don’t think it’s him, mostly because the Guinness poster is signed ‘E H’. Somewhere out there on the internet, someone (I’m afraid I can’t remember who or where) had suggested that this was an E Hanna. But as that name didn’t throw up many other posters, it may well be a red herring.
But I would like to see the J Hanna’s P&O menu one of these days if you ever felt like photographing it!
Ah, yes, the initials EH are definitely a pointer against John Hanna! Memo to self, must get a better screen one day ..
I’ll send a pic of the Hanna SS Iberia menu along. It’s good fun, definitely in the spirit of La Padden. More whimsical & less sentimental than the Country Fair covers (which I do, however, rather like)
I observe that the rather clever ‘Ten-Pound Pom’ posters went for £90 apiece! To former ‘£10 poms’, do you think? Or do you believe they achieved that on the strength of the graphics alone?
Blimey. I have no idea why though – although my slightly cynical guess would be that the pool of good Australian posters from the 1950s is fairly small. And these are good.
I must go back and check on eBay sold prices a bit more. There’s a new year’s resolution I might be able to achieve this month…