It’s not you, it’s me. Or maybe it’s them.

Even the least attentive people will have noticed a slight absence of content on Quad Royal recently. A fair amount of this is because my brain has been tangled up in other things, like hoarding and the world of objects in general, as opposed to the tiny sub-set of that constituted by British posters and […]

Hear more, do less

Now here’s something interesting, albeit thoroughly of its era in its attitude to racial difference.  (A riot of Colour and Music reads rather differently to us today with those images attached). Nonetheless, here it is and so, like the Volkswagen and Empire Marketing Board posters, we shall consider it. This was emailed to me by […]

pictorially speaking

Anonymous chemist’s poster, c. 1880 John Hassall, c. 1889. John Hassall, 1908. Maxwell Armfield, 1915. Saville Lumley, 1914 Alfred Leete, 1914. Anonymous, 1915 Anonymous, 1915 Tom Purvis, 1923. Edward McKnight Kauffer, 1927 Clive Gardiner, c.1930 Anonymous, 1927-1933 A. R Thomson, 1931. Vanessa Bell, 1934  Denis Constanduros,  1932 Gilroy, 1934 Richard Beck, 1937 Dame Laura Knight, […]

psst, over here…

Early days Anonymous chemist’s poster, c. 1880 The origins of the poster are confused (some understatement here) and obviously depend how you define a poster in the first place.  Generally, posters are believed to emerge just before the turn of the century, although this does rather beg the question as to why British cities were […]

Give that penguin a fish!

A recent acquisition on eBay was a few copies of Modern Publicity from the late 1950s and early 1960s.  I was going to share their delights with you anyway, but when I looked into the archives I realised that I’ve never actually blogged about this properly at all. Then when I looked a bit harder […]

Door 22

Christmas is getting close now and the turkeys, quite rightly, are starting to look worried. Mind you, I can’t see why the fish is looking so chipper, there’s going to be plenty of smoked salmon about too. Even though only the bottom one is signed Zero, both of these are from the period when Hans […]