Category: archives

Special purchase

archives, auctions

My initial thought when I first looked at the new Onslow’s catalogue a few weeks ago was that someone had better ring the BPMA, because they’ve been burgled.  Then I read the auction blurb more closely, and of course it says

including duplicates from the British Postal Museum & Archive
Collection

Panic over.

What they actually mean, it turns out, is duplicates from the BPMA collection, mostly featuring the work of Stan Krol.  You can buy single posters like this.

Stan Krol (born 1910) Round the clock service, printed for HMSO GPO PRD 683 1952 Round the clock service
Stan Krol, 1952, est. £100-150

Or indeed this one, which I love for drawing my attention to a problem that I was hitherto utterly unaware of.

Stan Krol (born 1910) To loosen frozen covers, printed for HMSO GPO PRD 535 1949 to loosen frozen covers use salt and hot water
Stan Krol, 1949, est. £100-150.

Both of these come with a bonus set of small size Post Office ‘art’ posters as well.

Art posters job lot John Minton etc

They must have hundreds of them, but even so it’s a funny way of getting rid of John Mintons if you ask me.  But no one did.

Anyway, back to the Krols.  If you want more than just a single poster (and have no desire for a John Minton), you can buy job lots of six.

Stan Krol (born 1910) A group of six 1950's GPO posters including Use Block Letters, Stick Correct Stamps, One red stamp book and Round the clock services, each - 37 x 24 cm; and one other Spencer Market Place Norwich GPO
Stan Krol, est. £150-200

And this lot is repeated three times.  Although there’s no escaping those art posters here either, you get a bonus Norwich Market Place (as shown above) whether you want it or not.  I’m guessing people mostly don’t if they are having to give it away like this.

That’s not the end of it either, there’s also another job lot of Krols, this time for the Post Office Savings Bank, also available twice over.

Stan Krol (born 1910) Post Office Savings Bank, five different designs, printed for HMSO, each 37 x 24 cm; and one othe
Stan Krol, est. £60-80

No Norwich Market Place in sight here either, which is a bonus.

Now I have two thoughts about this.  One is that it massively increases my knowledge of the work of Stan Krol, which can only be a good thing.  While the GPO posters are all on the BPMA website, the majority of the Post Office Savings Bank ones haven’t been digitised yet so some are entirely new to me.

But the other is that this is no way to sell off an archive.  Flooding the market with duplicates like this surely isn’t going to get the best value for the museum.  The result is going to be something like the final Morphets sale, when people were so boggled by the sheer volume of stuff on offer than poster after poster went really cheaply.  (Morphets have taken the online catalogue down from their server now, but I used to regularly go back and look at the fantastic posters that went for £40 or so and wish we’d bought everything).   But that was an estate sale, after Malcolm Guest’s death, so they had no choice.  Given that they had choices, I can’t help feeling that the BPMA aren’t handling this very well, and will not be getting the maximum value from their holdings. An instructive contrast is with the recent London Transport Museum sale, where there were no duplicates at all.*

This is particularly true of some of the more expensive posters in the sale, like these McKnight Kauffers.

E McKnight Kauffer (Edward 1890-1954) Outposts of Britain Posting Box at Lands End, GPO poster PRD 200 1937
McKnight Kauffer, 1937, est. £500-700

The description says very firmly that these are the much rarer large format posters (they are a slightly odd 30″ x 36″).  So then why sell them as individual posters, but then also as two pairs, and finally a set of four.  They’re a lot less rarer as the result of that.  Surely four would have been enough for one sale, with another batch next year, and so on.

But the sale isn’t entirely duplicates, there are also some single posters too, including a small handful of the van side posters that I love so much.

Andre Franion (dates not known) 2 1/2d for Inland Postcards, GPO poster PRD 1083 1960 For Inland Postcards
Andre Franion, 1960, est. £70-100

Guess what, you get a free John Minton with that too.  But I’m still tempted, even though I have no idea how I, or anyone else, would display something that’s almost a metre long.

Other delights include this Alick Knight.

Alick Knight Remember Inland Post Cards need a 2d Stamp, GPO PRD 785
Alick Knight, 1955, est. £100-150

I’m also very pleased to see the estimate on this Zero too.

Zero (Hans Schleger 1898-1976) Address your letters plainly, printed for PRD 260 GPO by W R Royle 1942
Hans Schleger (Zero), 1942, est. £400-600

This is because we’ve got one, and as a general rule anything I buy tends to lose rather than gain value so it’s nice to see something bucking the trend.

This is of course just a small selection of the GPO posters available, so it does pay to go and look at the catalogue yourself.  In the meantime, this can stand as an example of the vast number of this type of poster that are on offer.

Peter Edwards (dates not known) Old Compton Street, Soho, original GPO poster PRD 1078 1960
Peter Edwards, 1960, est. £70-100

There are also a whole range of other posters included as well, including the usual Shell educational posters.

Rowland Hilder (1905-1983) Shell Guide to Warwickshire, original poster printed by C Nicholls 1963
Rowland Hilder, 1963, est. £50-100 (with four others)

The 1914 centenary effect is also still holding strong, so there’s a set of World War One posters, including another Alfred Leete Lord Kitchener at a vast estimate.

Alfred Leete (1882-1933) Britons (Kitchener) "Wants You" Join Your Country's Army ! God Save the King !, an original but trimmed copy of the recruiting poster printed by the Victoria House Printing Company Co. Ltd. September 1914
Alfred Leete, 1914, ezt. £1,000-1,500

This is turning into the Keep Calm of World War One, as the rarity and high auction values brings yet more examples out of the woodwork with every new auction.

Speaking of which, for a change there isn’t a Keep Calm and Carry On poster in this sale, although you can have one of either of the others from these series should you wish.

Description Your Courage Your Cheerfulness Your Resolution Will Bring Us Victory, original WW2 poster with red background and white lettering and Crown, printed 1939
Anonymous, 1939, est. £300-400

Mostly, the WW2 offerings are more of historic than visual interest, the exception being a pair of Abram Games.

Abram Games (1914-1996) Talk Kills, explicit WW2 propaganda poster depicting soldier wearing helmet in the sea, PR 76 printed for HMSO c.1942
Abram Games, 1942, est. £400-500

What with all of this, it’s perhaps not surprising that there aren’t that many railways or London Transport posters this time round, although this circular Tom Eckersley is a delight.

Eckersley (Tom 1914 - 1997) Exact Fare Helps the Conductor, circle poster published by LT 1945 Exact Fare helps the conductor
Tom Eckersley, 1945, est. £100-150

A number of the London Transport posters – although not the Eckersley – are listed has having come from another London Transport Museum Sale, run by Sotheby’s in 1993.  I’d have loved to see how the values had changed between then and now, but sadly this date is just a bit too early for me to find the answers online.  So if anyone does have a copy of the catalogue and can run the comparison, I’d be very grateful.

And finally, there is this.

lounge-suit-ons-109
Anonymous, £20-40

A simple poster, doing its job.  Can’t argue with that.

 

*Underneath all the debate about how to sell off museum archives lurks a bigger question, which is whether museums should be selling off their collections at all.  Generally I tend to think no, because what people might discard as ‘worthless’ now could well turn out to be highly prized in later times, and also because museums have histories themselves, and these histories need to be recorded.  And because then people won’t give stuff to museums if they think it might be sold in the future, and the reasons go on and on and on.  But I do think posters are a slightly different case, precisely because they aren’t unique, and therefore it is possible to have too many.  As long as the museum has enough to cover losses, and damage and loans, then I can’t really see a good reason why they should keep 12, or 20 Stan Krols, just because they have them.  But I’d be interested in other people’s thoughts on this too.

 

Inequalities

archives, auctions

I know that it’s been said before on here, but it’s a thought that’s worth repeating.  Not all old posters are nice.  Not all of them are examples of great graphic design either.  Some of them are, quite frankly, mediocre.

Book Early and Go northwestern

I’ve been reminded of this truth by a lot of coach posters which has just come up in an auction (the auction itself was today, but I’m not suggesting that you’d want to buy them).  They are described as:

Approx. 20 various posters, mainly for coach tours to UK seaside and city destinations (Blackpool, London, Glasgow). All with wear – staining, torn edges and corners, to varying degrees. Approx. average size 29” x 20 ½”

But none of them are the usual suspects.  There’s no Daphne Paddens here, nor anything by Harry Stevens or Studio Seven either.

London coach poster north western midland red

In part I think that this is because a good number of these posters are actually pre-war.

Kendal poster archer ribble coaches

Southport Coach poster North Western Coaches 1930s

But even the ones that might date to post 1945 aren’t the same as the ones we are used to seeing.

Bridlington Coach poster North Western Coaches

They’re produced by northern coach companies to start with.

Yellow coaches map poster

Almost all the posters that I like and which get sold at auction and on eBay are, it’s worth noting, for more southerly companies.

Harry Stevens vintage east anglia coach poster 1950s

Now I have a theory about this – which has to remain a theory for the moment because I can’t face the prospect of researching the histories of various bus companies and their takeovers.  I think that the good quality coach posters are an aberration rather than the norm, because they were all the work of one bus company, and that’s Tillings.

They were a huge conglomerate, who ran a vast number of local bus and coach companies in the years before and after the Second World War.  (Can I just say that I’ve had to look up several bus history pages in order to make that statement, including one which invited me to listen to a man singing a song about Eastern Counties buses, so I’m already well out of my comfort zone here).  The posters I like – so the Paddens and the Stevens and so on – are, I am pretty sure, all produced for Tillings companies.

Lovely Royal Blue Daphne Padden coach poster

So it’s not that coach posters tend to be good design.  It’s Tillings’ coach posters that were good.  I like to imagine them being commissioned by some unknown coach guru, equivalent to Frank Pick at LT, or Jack Beddington at Shell, but who has, sadly, disappeared from history.

Meanwhile, in other, Northern, coach companies, the same standards of taste were not being applied.

594

All of which proves, once again, that we have to apply a lot of critical thought to the posters that we’re presented with in archives (and, frankly, by blogs like this).  They are sifted and sifted again: by what happens to survive, by what people decide is worth keeping, by what gets photographed and digitised, and by what ‘curators’ like me decide to show.  But that isn’t the whole picture, by quite a long chalk, and whenever something marginalised like this comes up, we should pay close attention.

Oh, and while I’ve been writing this blog post today, the auction has been and gone.  So I can now tell you that the posters fetched, £320, well over the estimate of £150-200.  Which also goes to show that taste is a very variable thing.

You can be sure of Australia

archives

I learned something new the other day.  Which is that the Shell Educational Posters – which I mention on here so often that I can’t be doing with chasing up all the links – aren’t just a British phenomenon.

The University of Melbourne have just digitised their Shell archive and a lot of the most visual artefacts are viewable online.  That includes these.

Shell Australia educational poster R Malcolm Warner 1959 Ayers Rock

And what they turn out to be are Shell posters about Australia.

They’re not exactly like the UK ones, because the dimensions are rather different (to me they look more like magazine ads than posters, but they are catalogued as posters so posters they must be).  But the layout, the typeface and the whole organising principles are the same.

Shell South Australia Wildflowers Poster R Malcolm Warner 1959

They aren’t just confined to wildflowers, either.  There are also a set of Australian birds.

Shell Educational poster birds of Western Australia R Malcolm Warner

Along with, naturally, shells and other such underwater things.

Shell Educational Poster R Malcolm Warner 1959 shells

They’re all by R. Malcolm Warner, about whom I know very little except that he was an Australian war artist.  But stylistically, his work sits very well with the British pictures from similar series.

What’s particularly nice about the archive is that some of the ancillary material has been collected as well.  So we know that some of the illustrations were used on Shell road maps.

Shell Road Maps australia 1950s

As well as some kind of collectible cards.

Collect Shell Australia cards wildflowers

And that’s about all I have to say about them really; this post is mostly to express my amazement and surprise that these examples from the other side of the world exist at all.

You can look at the full selection on the University of Melbourne’s website, although be warned, the interface is a bit idiosyncratic.

And many thanks to Kiara King, who pointed me via Twitter to the University’s blog, and hence on to the whole collection.

Done

archives, other

Well I went up Leeds at the end of last week, to give a talk at the Marks and Spencer archive about Daphne Padden.

This was a lot of fun, even if I’m not entirely sure that I fulfilled the alleged title of the talk, which was about Daphne Padden and design in the 1960s and 1970s.

Daphne Padden Marks and Spencers Christmas cake design

I did cover Daphne Padden’s work for Marks and Spencers, but that didn’t take very long at all, because we don’t really know very much about it.  Which isn’t just me not trying very hard, but between me knowing about Daphne Padden and the archive knowing all about M&S, there still isn’t very much information out there at all.

Daphne Padden M&S angel sandwich design and finished

And that, in the end, was one of the main themes of the talk: just how little we know about designers and design of this period, despite all the best intentions of archives, academics and people like me.  Served with a large dose of my general thoughts on archives, not knowing things and why coach posters are brilliant, most of which will be familiar to any regular reader of this blog

Daphne Padden Royal Blue vintage coach poster sailor 1957

 

I was considering posting the talk on here, but that’s before I delivered it and realised that it was a rambling and somewhat opionated mess that probably wouldn’t play that well without the facial expressions and apologies.

But I did meet lots of lovely audience people there too, who asked interesting questions, so I’m happy to answer any questions on here if anyone wants.  Although be warned in advance, quite a few of the answers tend to be, we just don’t know.

 

 

Talking yoghurt

archives

Apologies for the gap in transmissions, real life has a way of interfering sometimes.

This is just a quick post to remind you all that I will be speaking at the Marks and Spencers archive next month, on April 24th, about Daphne Padden’s career and her work for M&S, with particular reference to this yoghurt pot.

Daphne Padden Yoghurt pot design for Marks and Spencer

And whatever else comes into my head at the time, I don’t doubt.

Full details here, and please do come and say hello if you are there.  The yoghurt pot will also be making a personal appearance.

Be really cool, man, archive

archives

The recent announcement from the British Postal Museum and Archive announcing that they have upgraded their online catalogue may not have been the most retweeted 140 characters in the history of Twitter.  But the news is actually quite exciting.

On an entirely practical level the images are now larger than a postage stamp. The particular joy of this is that I can now get a proper look at the van posters, which are some of my favourite things in the world.

henrion-reindeer-long

I wonder if any of these have survived outside of the BPMA’s collections?  I’ve never come across one out in the wild.

1951 Alick Knight post early robin poster GPO

More than that, a whole lot of new material also seems to have been catalogued for the first time.  I had no idea that Barbara Jones had ever designed a poster for the GPO, but the evidence is there in full colour.

Barbara Jones GPO poster mermaid inland postcards

It’s from 1956, since you ask.

In addition, for the first time the catalogue now includes some Post Office Savings Bank posters.  This is clearly still a work in progress as, currently, there’s nothing in there by Daphne Padden and she did some of her best work for the POSB.

Daphne Padden post office savings bank poster with rabbits and owl.

What is in there, though, when you search for POSB posters, is a lot of work by Stan Krol, quite a bit of which I’ve never seen before.

Stan Krol post office savings bank poster 1960 guitar

With both posters and artwork included.

Stan Krol eureka gpo poster artwork 1960

All of which is a salutary reminder.   It’s not just that archives themselves are important, but also the way they are arranged and made accessible.  Because both of these things can change the way we think about the past.

Let’s just start with the contents.  A couple of years ago, I wrote about Stan Krol, saying that I couldn’t find out that much about the man or his output.  Obviously, pages of Stan Krol posters in the BPMA catalogue rather changes things.

stan krol telephonists job artwork GPO 1951

Morever, in the new, exciting BPMA catalogue, the results also come up differently.  Back in the day, the archive used to sort the results, so that the artwork would come up first, then the posters.  So I would skip through the artwork, and just look at the posters instead.

1968 Tom Eckersley detector van van poster

But now the two come up intermingled, which means that I don’t miss items like this Tom Eckersley internal poster, which shows as artwork but not as finished poster.

Tom Eckersley GPO internal poster mailbags 1950

All of which will, I am sure, make other differences to the way I think as well, even if I I don’t entirely know what the results will be yet.  Watch this space.

The biggest change of all, of course, is just the fact that online archives exist in the first place.  This blog, and I’m sure much else besides, simply wouldn’t exist without them.

GPO Gay Christmas van poster

If I had to travel from London to York and all points in between simply to see posters, it’s just not going to happen without a private income or a job that is prepared to pay for me to do it.  Neither of which things exist.  So online archives enable me, and many many other people, to think more widely and to see more points of reference.  But there is another more subtle benefit too, which is that they also allow people like me to choose.

Prior to this, the only way I would have been able to see any GPO posters would have been either in auction catalogues, or in books.  In each case, the posters would have been pre-selected.  But give me an archive and a computer, and I am at liberty to decide which items I find interesting.  So, perhaps, I am less likely to fall in with the accepted canon of ‘good’ posters as a result, and history ends up being written slightly differently.  Which is clearly a good thing.

Schlegel export drive gpo poster 1950

So hurrah for the lovely new BPMA catalogue and archives in general.

Games Giant postcards van poster 1961

But wonderful as all of this is, we mustn’t let this blind us to the fact that not everything is archived.  This may sound like a truism but it’s actually a really important point, and it’s something I think about a lot in connection with Daphne Padden.

Daphne Padden POSB poster knight

Her work has been massively under-recognised over the years, and her profile still isn’t as high as it should be.  Now there were plenty of reasons for this – and being a woman working on the outskirts of London must have played a considerable part.  But a big part of it has to be because she just worked for the wrong people.

Daphne Padden lytham st Annes British Railway poster

Railway posters were sold and collected when they were produced, and nowadays they are traded at auction, reproduced in books and as fridge magnets, and kept in a socking great archive in York (now there’s an interface that could still do with taking a long hard look at itself).  But she only ever did a few of those.

Daphne Padden isle of Man BRitish railways poster

Instead her main customer were the coach companies.  And where is the coach archive, I hear you ask?  Well exactly.

Daphne Padden Royal Blue vintage coach poster sailor 1957

There isn’t a collection of these anywhere; hardly any survive and it’s possible that the most comprehensive selection (now that the Malcolm Guest collection got sold) is in our spare room.  Which is ridiculous.

Coach tour rabbits Daphne padden coach poster

And because my spare room doesn’t have an archivist or – more to the point – doesn’t actually contain more than a couple of dozen coach posters when hundreds were produced, people don’t know about these designs.  So they don’t get reproduced in books, or as fridge magnets, and in the end they disappear from view.

Daphne Padden Southend coach poster

Along with the designers, like Daphne Padden, who produced them.

Spring coach poster Daphne Padden

So while we can have a lot of fun with the archives that are there, it’s always worth using them with half a mind to the ones that don’t exist.