eBay Archives - Page 11 of 14

Calling You

eBay

While I am sure that you are all now saving up every last penny for the Christies sale, there are a couple of good odds and ends on eBay right now. And, not surprisingly, they are a bit cheaper.

Pick of the pops are these two ARP posters, being sold by one MrsLovely.

The McKnight Kauffer I have seen before (not least because we have a smaller version on our sitting-room wall) but I don’t think I’ve ever come across the Keely until now.

What’s interesting is that if you take a flick through MrsLovely’s feedback and past sales, you will discover that she’s already sold one copy of the Keely (for the £120 asking price) and two copies of the McKnight Kauffer. So someone, somewhere must have come across a stash of pre-war ARP posters which were never used. Which does give me hope that there are still plenty more old posters out there waiting to be discovered. By me, preferably.

Also in her past sales, I found this Paul Nash.

It’s a collotype proof for Urne Buriall (enough to recommend it on its own) and a rather wonderful thing to get should you have had £180.

If you’re feeling rather more lighthearted, though, you could always plump for this wide-eyed giraffe.

A little eaten, but still currently quite covetable at £39.99.

And finally, proof that aesthetic value isn’t everything in posters, particularly when there’s railways involved.

This 1960s Christmas poster went for just £14.49 a few days ago.

While this one from the late 40s made £72.

Now, in a fight on looks alone, I think I’d probably just pick the 1961 poster, although I probably wouldn’t put either of them on the wall.

So why did the second one make so much more? Yes, it’s older. And yes, it does also have a certain historical value as a record a period when British Railways had only just been formed but the identities of the pre-war railway companies hadn’t entirely disappeared yet (although you could read them on this poster as going up in flames). But even that, surely, can’t make almost £60 worth of difference. It has to be just the sheer fact of those names being there which has given this poster the extra value. Strange, but true.

Both of these posters, incidentally, came from the Malcolm Guest collection, which means that I can tell you that the seller spent £65 on them and so is just about in profit, with four more posters to go.

Open wide please

eBay

I don’t have time to write complicated posts at the moment, and now I can’t even manage to write the easy post I was going to do because that’s turned all complicated too. So instead, have these.

There’s three of them, they’re on eBay (currently and inexplicably with no bids at all) and I think they’re rather lovely. They’re by Montague Reed, about whom I know nothing at all (and, because he shares his name with a firm of accountants in Bagshot, is almost impossible to Google sensibly). Has anyone else come across him?

But Mr Crownfolio says, quite rightly, that we’d never put them up and so why would we buy them?

He’s right, of course. Although that still doesn’t explain the other three hundred posters that aren’t on the wall either.

But you could have a go. As the listing says, why buy a reproduction bit of 50s kitch, when you could have the real thing?

Sold and unsold

eBay

Right, it’s eBay Watch time once more. I do this so often that I feel as though it should have its own logo. I shall work on that when I get a moment.

Your starter for ten is that this, surprisingly, didn’t sell.

There isn’t enough Barnett Freedman in the world, so I would have thought that this would have gone, even with a few flaws and an asking price of £100. Shows how little I know.

But this did sell, for £23.22.

Interestingly, although it’s a Studio Seven classic coach poster, I’m not sure that it came from Morphets, perhaps the sale has brought a few more out of the woodwork. (We didn’t buy it, incidentally; there’s the small question of what we do with the thirty-odd coach posters that we already have to sort out first…)

I don’t remember either of these from the sale either, so perhaps there is now going to be a boom in coach posters (or a mass unloading, depending on your point of view).

The top one is by Atkins, the bottom by Bigg, but they’re on for £75 and £1oo respectively (although, I have to say, I much prefer the cheaper one, if only for the White Horse on it).

But these ones might have come from the sale. Perhaps. Either that or Patlid is a seller who has found a rather good cache of unused posters.

I can of course wish that this fabulous Bromfield would go for the £9.99 that it is currently listed at, but rather doubt that it will.

Meanwhile over on the other side of the Atlantic, MaxReinhold is selling even more Zero London Underground posters from the war.

He’s had so many of these now that I can’t really get excited about them any more, although I would be interested to know where they came from. Perhaps I’ll ask.

Finally, a couple of sixties gems. This LT poster from 1964 is by Laurence Scarfe and is really rather nice.

Although whether I would actually want those mad staring eyes framed and on the wall of my house is another question. So it might not be the £90 of nice that they are asking for.

And then, from just a few years later, there’s this Alan Aldridge poster for a 1968 event at the Royal Festival Hall. With The Grateful Dead and John Peel, natch. It’s already been on Retro to Go, but I thought I’d tell you anyway.

Besides, if you want one, you can almost certainly have one, because the seller seems to have found a whole stock of unused copies. There are more than ten left, and getting one will set you back just £30.

There is more out there too – mainly a whole slew of railway posters – but those will have to wait until next week. Or maybe tomorrow.

Friday Miscellany

eBay

Odds and ends from the internet today. Mostly because I wanted to post this.

Normally it lives on the shelf in Richard Hogg‘s studio. Lucky him.

You can buy some later Eckersley on eBay at the moment too.

We’ve got a copy of that already. But I can say with some certainty that it didn’t cost £100, which is its starting price.

There on the other hand, people seem to have come back to eBay after the summer holiday lull with high expectations of what their posters are worth.

Both this Unger

and this William Fenton reproduction (previously mentioned in despatches here)

are up with a starting price of £44.99.

But perhaps the seller isn’t deluded. Because this delightful John Burningham – also a reproduction – has just sold for £56.01.

The John Burningham book has arrived, by the way, and is an utter delight. So more on him next week. For now, a look at the proper version of the poster above to cheer you up on a dull Friday morning.

Perhaps I might even go on a country walk myself this weekend.

Two for the shelves

eBay

Look what’s turned up on eBay.

Poster Design by Tom Eckersley. Currently a complete steal at £6, but I suspect it will go higher, as the going rate on Abebooks is running close to £50.

But mostly pleasing because it allows me to post this again.

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Who knew colour separation could be such fun.

While we’re thinking about books on eBay, you could also also pick up “the definitive book on London Transport posters“. Perhaps.

But you only get to see the book way down their listing; they’re advertising it via this rather lovely bit of Bawden.

It comes from this 1936 poster for Kew Gardens.

This is currently at 99p (the book, not the poster), but again I’m sure that won’t last. Watch and wait.

Bits, bobs, and Bawden

eBay

Although I’ve been mildly obsessed with what’s been happening in Harrogate, life has in fact been going on elsewhere.

This rather wonderful Abram Games poster went past on eBay on Monday, for a what seems like a fair £231.

I’ve never seen one out in the wild before, and I approve of it.

Meanwhile, if you do have any money left, a few other posters are also coming up in the next week or so should you fancy them.

Probably the most interesting is this London Electricity Board poster. The seller actually has three, but this one by Geoffrey Clarke is my favourite.

The listing says that they’re from the late 1940s, and they seem to be from a collaboration between the LEB and the Royal College of Art. They’re another example of how our history of posters is mostly determined by what survived; these are really interesting attempts to produce posters of cultural worth, just as the GPO or Shell did, but I’ve never come across them before or seen them mentioned. If anyone can shed any more light on them, I’d be really grateful.

Elsewhere, this slightly odd Geraldine Knight poster is from 1972, with an inital asking price of £30.

The original artwork is pictured on the London Transport Museum site, and it’s a great lump of bronze. Which may quite possibly make this poster unique. And I imagine plays havoc with their archiving systems.

Then, in competition for worst eBay picture of the week, there is this Badmin coach design.

The seller is hoping for £99, which isn’t entirely unreasonable given the prices that this kind of thing was fetching at Morphets (I wonder if that’s what flushed it out onto eBay or whether it’s a simple coincidence). But it’s a very high start price, and probably needs a few more photos to do well. As ever, watch this space.

And then there’s this, which isn’t a poster at all but is so delightful that I can’t resist, and has the added bonus of almost certainly not going for £99.

It’s from 1962 by James Mawtus-Judd, about whom I can discover precisely nothing at all. But it’s still lovely

Finally, I’ve been meaning to mention Martin Steenson’s blog for a while. He has the admirable aim of providing a proper overview of the work of well known artists and designers (as opposed to the scattered thoughts and biased opinions on offer over here).

His latest piece is on Edward Bawden, so please do go and take a look.