Deja vu all over again

I seem to have come back from holiday only to wander into a fold in time, because at least some of the posters on offer out there seem strangely familiar.

Lets start with Dreweatts in Bristol, who are once again selling the work of Percy Drake Brookshaw.

Percy Drake Brookshaw Boat Race poster 1927 London Transport
Percy Drake Brookshaw, 1927, est. £150-200

This is not a new thing, in fact it’s something which has been going on almost since the very beginning of this blog.

Percy Drake Brookshaw Wimbledon tennis London Transport poster 1928
Percy Drake Brookshaw, 1928, est. £200-300

The only real change being that they have got slightly more realistic in their estimates.

Percy Drake Brookshaw shell poster cricket just out 1933
Percy Drake Brookshaw, 1933, est. £300-400

Although I can’t remember these posters ever coming up before.

Percy Drake Brookshaw Green Line posters 1936 London Transport
Percy Drake Brookshaw, 1936, est. £200-300

Once again, they are provenanced from the artist’s family by direct descent.  I can only imagine, with some envy, the stack of posters they must have had before they started selling.

Elsewhere in auctionworld, a curiosity in Bloomsbury’s British Art Sale.  Even they describe it as ‘a macabre vision’.

Betty Swanwick RA (1915-1989) Safety First!' a macabre vision for a Ministry of Transport poster
Betty Swanwick, est. £1,000-1,500

It’s a design for a poster, although not one I’ve ever seen.  Maybe even the ministry thought it was a step too far.  There are some examples of her painting up for sale too – I rather like this.

Betty Swanwick RA (1915-1989) The Gardeners
Betty Swanwick, est. £1,500-2,000

Although the price is once again a reminder why we collect posters rather than fine art.  I’m sure there are lots more wonderful things lurking in that auction too, but I don’t dare take a very close look in case I start spending money which is meant to be used for house renovation.

Meanwhile on eBay, there’s more on offer than I’d normally expect to find in the doldrums of August, and they’re proper posters too.  The kind that you might normally expect to find in auctions.  Let’s start with a handful of classic railway posters.  Well, post-war classics at least.

British Railways poster

That – by Ronald Lampitt and dating from 1952 – is my favourite, but there’s also this Lander, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen before.  Or at least not noticed.

Lander British railways poster 1952 Northern Ireland

But it’s this Kenneth Steele which seems to be the most popular with the bidders so far.

British Railways poster loch ness Kenneth Steele

The price as I write stands as £221, with more than four days to go.

Also doing well are a set of three Empire Marketing Board posters from the 1930s.

Chas Pears Empire Marketing board poster Gibraltar

The Gibraltar example above, by Chas Pears, has already reached £122, but you can still have his version of the Suez Canal for a bid over £5.59 if you like.

Chas Pears Empire Marketing board poster  Suez Canal 1930s

Finally, an oddity from our old friends PosterConnection.  I don’t suggest that you actually buy this, what with it costing $400 and all, but it’s worth a look.

London Transport poster Music in London, by Hans Unger and Eberhard Schulze, 1964

It’s by our old friends Hans Unger and Ebhard Schulze, but it’s not a plain mosaic, rather it’s a collage with a bit of mosaic in.

The poster is also missing the text beneath  – here is the LT Museum copy by way of comparison.

Music in London, by Hans Unger and Eberhard Schulze, 1964

Although whether that makes it worth more or less I have no idea. Any thoughts?

Odd and odder

This week, Ebay seems mostly to be selling oddities.  And the oddest of the odd has to be this, a redacted Daphne Padden poster for £9.99.

Daphne Padden post office savings bank poster which has been redacted

It would be rather nice if they hadn’t done that, wouldn’t it?

The listing does at least give a bit of provenance:

we understand that this advertisement was displayed in the Post Office Savings Bank Kew until it closed down , 1975 we believe.

My guess was that they rather liked this poster, and so when the Post Office Savings Bank changed its name, they just blacked it out and carried on.  There’s another example from the same place and seller as well.

Vintage GPO savings bank poster redacted

Neither, I’d suggest, are worth buying, but still an interesting object.

As is this.  Which isn’t a poster so I strongly suggest that you don’t spend the best part of £30 on it.

Youths in the post office vintage leaflet

I can’t tell you anything useful about the design either, other than that it is rather good and I would guess prewar.  Does anyone know any more? I may also return to addressing youths in that way too.

Meanwhile this poster is odd in every which way: it’s a rare survival of a commercial advertisement, it’s for an event I’ve never ever heard of and I had no idea such things went on at the Albert Hall.

Ford at the Albert Hall poster

It also doesn’t look very British, by which I think I mostly mean that I’ve never really seen anything like it.  It’s actually just finished as I was writing this piece, but sold for just £58, and I would think it’s worth a lot more than that to the right classic car owning buyer.

Is this Tom Purvis – well they say it is – World War Two poster odd or not?  I can’t decide.

Tom Purvis vintage world war two poster air raid information ebay

Perhaps the frame makes it look a bit strange, because it is after all a workaday poster which was just there to tell people what to do, not be a work of art.  Good to see it, though, because very few of these kinds of things do survive precisely because they aren’t as good to look at as an Abram Games or Lewitt Him from the same period.

There are one or two sensible things too, like this British Railways poster  for Right Labelling which the seller has down as 1960s but I might put a bit earlier.

Vintage British Railways poster right labelling 1950s

Along with this pair of classic railway posters for Inverness and Somerset respectively.

Vintage British Railways poster 1950s lance Cattermole Inverness

Vintage British Railways map poster somerset by bowyer

There are a couple of other map posters being sold by the same seller too, so if that’s your kind of thing, you know where to go.

But I do wonder whether he’s going to get any offers.  Recently I said that prices on eBay seem to be matching those at auction.  This was a hostage to fortune, and eBay has since then concentrated on proving me wrong.    Take this classic London Transport poster, for example.

Vintage London Transport poster theatreland 1921 Jan Poortenaar

It got plenty of bidding attention, but at £188 failed to reach its reserve.

Elsewhere, this British Railways poster failed to sell at just £48.

Frank Newbould vintage British Railways poster Stratford on avon 1950s

One of Frank Newbould’s more peculiar turns if you ask me.

What’s to blame for this?  Is it the new Greek market turmoil, or just the good weather keeping everyone away from their computers?  Answers in the comments below please.

Lofty finds

Mr Crownfolio and I are about to put an offer in on a house without an attic.  This is quite annoying, because it rather ruins our chances of finding a fantastic cache of posters in there.  After the recent set of coach posters, another seller on eBay is profiting from their attic.  Only this time it’s school prints.

Michael Rothenstein school print tree felling from eBay

And we didn’t win a single one of them.

school print Barbara Jones fairground yard from eBay

Grrr. Full list here if you’re interested.  I reckon he’s made a good thousand pounds out of them already, and there is one more still to go too – this John Nash which is around until 7pm this evening, so be quick.

John Nash school print from Ebay

Apart from that little treasure trove, eBay is fairly quiet at the moment.  Star exhibit is this World War Two Home Front poster, which is I think quite rare, and also only hanging around until early this evening.

Keep it Under Your Hat vintage world war two propaganda poster

I particularly like the mice holding it flat at the top.  A different seller in the United States has a whole selection of various British Home Front posters for sale, of which the most interesting is probably this one.

Vintage world war two propaganda poster house bombing

The seller has called themselves ‘valuable _books_and_ephemera’ which is pretty much asking me to pick a fight with their prices.  The one above is only slightly steep at £49, but the more evocative, if less graphically appealing images like the one below, are on offer for a rather eye-watering £250-ish.

Vintage world war two propaganda poster evacuation reminder

Thank you Mr Valuable, but no thank you.

Also profoundly over-priced is this National Savings poster, which even considering that institution’s track record in producing things I don’t want to look at, is pretty grim.  And yet on a Buy It Now at £70.

vintage 1950s National Savings poster of some horridness

While I’m here, an interesting digression, pointed out to me by regular James Manning.

McKnight Kauffer Daily Herald original birds artwork

That’s the original artwork for McKnight Kauffer’s famous Daily Herald poster, and it went for a whopping €33,500 at an auction in Amsterdam last week.  I wonder who bought it? A museum I hope, it certainly deserves to be in one.

And in the meantime, if any of you have an attic that needs clearing, I’d be only to happy to oblige.

D I Y Barbara Jones

Barbara Jones is becoming increasingly collectable.  At least that’s the message I’m getting from eBay.  We recently watched a whole collection of BBC schools booklets go past; most went for one or two pounds if they sold at all.  The one exception was this.

Barbara Jones BBC Time and Tune booklet 1960

By Barbara Jones, it sold for £21.50.

All of which preamble is mainly so I can convey my pleasure at getting this for just one squid.

Barbara Jones Woodentops colouring book front cover

It pretty much had to be by Barbara Jones given how similar it is to her Woodentops book, but it also does us the favour of saying so inside.

Barbara Jones woodentops colouring book inside front page

Most of the pages inside have been coloured in – I was going to say sadly, but it isn’t really, it’s just the book being used as it was meant to be.  One or two were missed though, so you can get an idea of what the drawings are like.

Barbara Jones Woodentops colouring book skipping

Leafing through it, I am struck by what hardworking farmers the Woodentop family are.  They haul the hay in with just a horse-drawn cart, collect eggs and get up early for the milking.

Barbara Jones Woodentops colouring book milking picture

All of which would have been quite normal then, but seems like a long-lost rural idyll from the vantage point of today.  And now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some colouring-in to do.

Cheap and Expensive

Bonus extra blog post today (although I can’t type very well at the moment because my fingers are freezing).  I was going to put the eBay news on the end of yesterday’s post, but then it turned out that there was quite a lot on offer.  So now they have a post of their own instead.

The posters up on eBay at the moment seem to fall into a few tidy categories.  Firstly are expensive posters which probably have a right to be expensive.  Top of this list is this Jack Merriott British Railways poster.

Jack Merriott Findhorn British Railways poster

With just a few hours to go it’s already at £415  – a price which will probably have risen even higher by the time I press ‘publish’ on this post.  It might well make almost as much as the version which went at Morphets two years ago, which sold for £600.  For the right poster, it’s starting to look as though eBay wins hands down over the auction houses, simply because the fees are so much lower.  That’s if you’re selling of course; for buyers, I’m not so sure.  I still slightly balk at spending that much money on something I haven’t seen in the flesh.

Another example of the righteously expensive is another British Railways poster, also going today and currently at £142.

Edward Wesson vintage British Railways poster 1950s Moulsham

Finally in this category is a lovely London Transport poster which has been mentioned in dispatches on here before.

Vintage London Transport poster How to make a party go D M Earnshaw

The Buy It Now price of £390 strikes me as a bit more of a dealer level than an eBay level.  But then it is framed, and given what the Findhorn poster is going for anything could be possible these days.

Category two is expensive things which are currently going cheap.  Like this Guinness poster which is currently at £10.50 but, if it is original, is going for a song.

Vintage guinnes poster gilroy Zookeeper and seal

Of course whether something is original or not is always the question looming over every eBay listing.  The dimensions look right on this one, although it is a bit clean.  Any thoughts anyone?

Also cheap is this very odd survival – although I have no idea what it should actually be worth, I suspect it is more than the current £20.  It’s a poster for the 1929 Royal Opera House Ball.  What larks.

Royal Opera House Ball 1929 poster

But it’s rather good, isn’t it.  No word of an artist though.

In the other corner is expensive things which probably should be cheap, and we’ve got just one contender here, this Tom Purvis, which I have difficulty imagining someone paying £149 for.

Tom Purvis Empire Buy British poster

Now don’t get me wrong, because it’s a perfectly good poster, but I just don’t think many people want to hang it on their walls. Or do they?  I shall watch and wait and see.

Then of course there are cheap things that probably should stay that way.  I have a sneaking affection for this British Railways poster – it’s probably the cat – but that still doesn’t make it worth very much.

Vintage British Railways poster Plymouth and Cornwall timetable

So £2.99 is probably about right.   While even £20 seems a bit steep for this National Savings poster, even with the Coronation interest.

National Savings vintage coronation poster

Why were National Savings posters so uniformly dreary, when so many of the posters around them were so good?  Truly I do not know.

Those were going to be your lot, but even as I’ve been writing, some more listings have been passed over to me, and they both come under the heading of things that do not fit into my neat categories at all because I have no idea what they are worth.

This man is selling a big set of Kodak shop display posters.  Given the spelling of color, they are probably American, but I won’t hold that against them too much.

1950s Kodak display card

1950s Kodak display card

The starting price for each is £19.99 but I have no idea if that is fair or not.

This, meanwhile, is not a poster despite appearances to the contrary.  It’s a showcard.

Tom Eckersley vintage Guinness poster showcard

But as it’s currently priced at 99p I can say with some confidence that it is a bargain.  And would look rather good on someone’s bookshelves, I think.

On the buses

Last week, Mr Crownfolio and I scored that increasingly rare thing, a bargain on eBay.  Although this did involve us chancing a reasonably large sum of money on what was described as

a lot of old railway posters that i got when i was turning out my grandparents old house they are at a ruff guess about 25 plus

along with a picture that didn’t give a lot away.

lot of posters on eBay

A bit of additional description says that there were some half-page posters as well as some full page ones, but we had no idea what would turn up.  Well apart from this, of course.

Llandudno tourist information poster 1950s vintage seaside

And the knowledge that at least some of the posters would have tatty edges.

Fortunately we weren’t disappointed.  As a starter, this Alan Durman on its own would have been quite enough to keep us happy.

Alan Durman butlins poster for coaches 1950s vintage classic

Fortunately there were more goodies even than that.

Vintage coach poster Llandudno

But what I don’t think we’ve ended up with  is a set of railway posters.  The Butlins one does say ‘Travel by Train’ at the bottom, but there’s no British Railways logo or anything.  More importantly, they’re all 20″ x 30″, so standard advertising display size, Double Crown,  rather than British Railways standard display size of 40″ x 25″ or Double Royal.  To prove my point, here is the Alan Durman Butlins poster as a Double Royal with the British Railways logo on.

Alan Durman vintage british railways Butlins poster 1950s bathing beauty

I don’t think I will be complaining about the misdescription though.  Because Double Crown wasn’t just the preserve of commercial advertisers.  The other big advertisers who used it as standard were the coach companies, and that’s what I think we’ve got here, a batch of coach posters.  Which isn’t a very difficult deduction to make looking at a set of posters like these.

Vintage Coach poster for Bridlington

Vintage coach poster brighton and hove 1950s

Vintage coach poster wye valley lander

The bottom one is by Lander and is I think particularly nice.  If you needed any more persuading, this one even says coach on it, with a handy picture too.

Vintage coach poster isle of man

That seems pretty certain then.  Even better, there are some good posters amongst the lot, not least of which is this Daphne Padden.

Daphne Padden vintage coach poster scarborough

There are also some artists I’ve not come across before.  These two posters are signed Greene.

Vintave coach poster morecambe greene 1950s

Vintage coach poster colwyn bay greene

I think this is John Greene, quite possibly working with his wife Margaret too.  But I’m not going to go off on a research digression for once, they can wait for another day.  Meanwhile one of my favourites isn’t signed at all.

Vintage coach poster portsmouth navy days

There are few more as well, and among them a set of these oddities.

Bus destination poster, vintage 1950s

Mr Crownfolio reckons that these must have been put up by the various stops at bus stations so that people knew they were getting on the right coach.  But if there’s a transport historian out there with a better theory, do let me know.

Now we just need to decide what to do with a whole heap of posters with a lot of blank space on.  Perhaps we’ll frame them on magnetic backing and use them as notice boards.  Even then, we’ve probably still got quite a lot…