eBay Archives - Page 14 of 14

On the buses (or not)

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I keep planning posts, but then they get taken over by events. Like this, another interesting poster that’s popped up on eBay.

This isn’t, I will freely admit, a classic piece of design, but it is an interesting piece of social history. I can’t explain much better than the seller has.

This is one of a series of 3 posters issued by London Transport in 1958 to encourage passengers back onto the buses after a disastrous strike by crews. All 3 posters were drawn by Lobban and featured humorous scenes of people in inclement weather being encouraged onto a bus by a figure with its head made up of the London Transport bullseye.

A brief bit of investigation means that I now know that the 1958 bus strike went on for seven weeks and, everyone seems to agree, had a huge impact on London commuting. In an age of increased car ownership, many people went to work in their car, and never went back to the buses (hence the slight desperation of this poster).

Because of this, many less popular bus routes were axed and garages closed, driving even more people onto their cars or the Tube. And so we arrive at the overcrowded and gridlocked London of today.

So there you go. I have been educated by eBay and now know something I didn’t before. Even if I don’t necessarily want to buy the poster.

Modernism to go

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Right now, you can pick up the bargain of the year so far on eBay. It’s this:

and this

and also this

In fact it’s five posters designed by Wim Crouwel for the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in the 1960s, and as I write, they are currently going for under £10 for the lot. Which is madness. They’d be a bargain just for five anonymous pieces of good design, but for five pieces of Wim Crouwel’s work, it’s a crime.

We simply don’t have designers like Crouwel here in the UK. This isn’t only because we didn’t do this kind of formal, grid-based, type centred modernism. (To get a sense of how mainstream it was in Holland, just imagine the British Museum or the V&A commissioning a poster like this in the 60s, and then go and have a lie down to clear the resulting headache.)

It’s also because, for some reason, very few designers in this country have achieved the ubiquity managed by Crouwel.

“It was actually quite difficult to avoid Wim Crouwel’s work. In the 1960s the Netherlands was inundated with posters, catalogues, stamps designed by him, even the telephone book.”
– Karel Martens

Who can match this? Abram Games did design the Festival of Britain symbol, it’s true, but he hardly styled the entire 50s. Perhaps Hans Schleger is the only one who can come close* – with his work for Libertys and MacFisheries (of which more later), the John Lewis logo and even the London Transport bus stop roundel to his name, it would have been easy to live, travel and shop in a Schleger-shaped world. But did many people ever notice they were doing this? I rather doubt it.

Anyway, this is a bit of a distraction from the business in hand, which is that there are five brilliant pieces of design for sale for not very much money at all so far. Proof that eBay can still come up with the goods sometimes.

*I am disregarding Pentagram as I find most of their designs a bit safe and dull. Perhaps I was living a visual life shaped by Pentagram in the 1970s and 80s, but if I was I didn’t care much either way. But if you think I am in need of correction on this – or you’ve got a better example – please do say.

Q.E.D.

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This is an extra bonus post because, as if to underline what I said yesterday, this – or rather these as there are two of them on offer – popped up on eBay as well.

It’s a brilliant piece of design, but would I ever frame it and hang it on the wall? Not really. I don’t even want to just buy it and own it and stash it with all the ones that live under the spare bed, Perhaps my taste simply isn’t good enough.

And in case you’re thinking that £50 seems a bit of a steal for this, even on the Bay, double check the dimensions. It’s only 20 x 15 (ish, it seems to have shrunk a bit in the wash).

Mmmm, 1976 never looked so good

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Sold on eBay this weekend*, proof that poster design hadn’t gone into a complete decline by the 1970s, in the shape of this wonderful London Zoo poster by Abram Games.

I think this is great, and that’s a bit of a rare event. Because, in my mind, Abram Games is rather like oysters or Gainsborough. Everyone else thinks they’re wonderful, and I know I’m supposed to think that they’re fabulous as well, but I can’t do it. I can admire them, I can see why other people pay lots of money for them (ish) but I just don’t like them that much. With Abram Games, his posters are great pieces of design, but more often than not they feel to me a bit worthy, if not dour, and I wouldn’t necessarily want them hanging on my wall. This, however, has a real lightness of touch which makes it a pleasure to look at – and the tiger (edit: of course that’s what it is) is smiling. Who wouldn’t want to live with that.

Another surprise about this auction was the finishing price of just over £156, which felt quite low. This isn’t just because it’s a lovely poster of a kind which doesn’t come up that often, but also because of idiosyncracies of eBay keyword search. Named designers sell much better than good design, and Games seems to be – correct me if you think otherwise – the top search in posters. So a bit of a surprise that this didn’t turn into a more expensive battle.

If all of that fuzziness and folding is giving you a headache, by the way, this is what it ought to look like in focus and with a bit of light restoration.

Rather nice.

*You will notice as this blog goes on that I’ll point you to some eBay auctions while they’re going on, and to others after they’ve finished. This may be a bit infuriating – for which I apologise – but it doesn’t take the mind of Einstein to work out that it rather depends on whether or not we’ve decided to bid on them. These days, it’s hard enough to pick up a bargain on eBay without inviting half the internet (or, as things stand at the moment, the rather smaller number of readers of this blog) to bid on the posters we’re after as well.

Why would you want to buy a poster?

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I could say quite a lot about railwayana and other transport obsessives. And even more about eBay. But for now, it’s enough just to say that one reason to buy a poster might be to decorate your bus. Yes, you heard me right there.

That’s why this eBay seller is suggesting you buy these. The left hand one is a pretty grim bit of 1970s brown, but the other one isn’t bad at all, particularly for £1.99 + postage. And there are nine, so you can all have one. Even if you haven’t got a Routemaster.

The Lord Mayor’s Show poster is by Peter Roberson who did a fair amount for London Transport, including this

which is about as wonderfully 1956 as it is possible to be.