eBay Archives - Page 3 of 14

When did I last see this poster?

I don’t know. Two weeks off for the Easter holidays, lots of racing around and then I come back and discover that I can’t remember what on earth I meant to say about posters before I went. Well there is something about the S.S. Canberra, but frankly that all looks a bit complicated for today, while trying to make sense of the Christies results will just give me a headache (although we do have a short eyewitness report here if you like). So instead, I give you this.

In part, I am posting it because I can’t remember when I did last see this poster. It used to be on the wall of our stairs, but eight months after we sold those stairs, and the rest of the house that went with it, we’re still in rented limbo and the poor ravens are still in storage in Warminster. And they are rather too good for that; even if they were only £21 on eBay, I esteem them very highly.

The poster is by Richard Barrett Talbot Kelly. Now when I look him up on the London Transport Museum website, it turns out that he was a bit of a slow worker, for them at least. He produced this in 1927.

This pair poster in 1948.

Then the ravens finally came along in 1960. Five years before that, he’d also produced this poster for British Railways too.

All of which led me to imagine that he might have had another life as a wildlife painter and just produced posters on the side. So imagine my surprise when I clicked on a link to some of his paintings at Liss Fine Art, and found this instead.

It turns out that Richard Barrett Talbot Kelly was born in 1896, and served in the First World War. (He also wrote a book about his experiences Subaltern’s Odyssey: Memoir of the Great War, 1915-17 if you’re interested). So he was close to retirement age when he painted those ravens; I’d never have known.

In that long time of working he did also do a fair bit of wildlife painting, mostly birds. Here are some geese which sold at Christies a while back.

I still like the ravens best, though, and I shall probably like them even more now that I know something of the man who painted them. With a bit of luck I might even get to see them again soon.

Profit Margin

auctions, eBay

Following on from the comments on my last piece about the inexplicable gap between eBay prices and elsewhere, a couple of instructive compare and contrasts for you.

Firstly, this excellent piece of sixties-iana, about which I know nothing except the rather obvious fact that it is for Pan Am.

Oh, and that its current asking price is $3,250. If you’re tempted, it’s in an online exhibition of travel posters held by the International Vintage Poster Dealers Association. I am not, you will be unsurprised to learn, a member.

However, if you are more of a fan of the poster than the price, then you can rue your missed opportunity, because it did turn up on eBay at the end of last year, where it fetched just $384.99.

Example two we have seen only the other day, as it’s Victor Pasmore’s exhibition poster which is up at Christies next month.

This too came up on eBay only about six weeks ago, when it went for just £125. In case you need reminding, the Christies estimate is £600-800.

Now I know that price can depend on condition, but even so the discrepancies are huge. And given that both these posters are fairly rare (I have never ever seen either of them before now), the odds must be quite good that it’s the same poster being sold on.

One more example, although in this case the price discrepancy is partly explained by the fact that the original listing is in German. Tom Eckersley’s book on Poster Design, the source of this wonderful illustration.

Now the last time this went past on eBay, the asking price £75, give or take a penny. But the lucky purchaser in the German auction got it for just one euro. And you can’t really blame that on the whole thing being written in foreign, because it did say ‘Tom Eckersley’ very clearly in the title.

So, eBay: an enigma and a mystery. And probably also quite a good business model if you’re interested in buying cheap and selling expensive. Any economists out there with any more interpretations?

While we’re on the subject of Tom Eckersley, another way round high auction prices is available. The V&A are selling reproductions of his Keep Britain Tidy Poster as part of the merchandising for their Modern British Design show.

Which I suppose may mean that there is an Eckersley poster in there somewhere, along with everything else. I really ought to go and see that and we are going to London in a few weeks time. But given that we are already planning to subject small Crownfolio to the Jeremy Deller exhibition, the V&A might be a step too far for one day. Perhap we’ll go and see the dinosaurs instead.

File under miscellaneous

auctions, eBay

The email from the Swiss auction house Poster-Auctioneer announcing their latest auction has once again dropped into my mailbox. So I flicked through page after page of foreign posters, pretty sure that none of them would appear on the blog. Until I came to this Donald Brun and my resolution crumbled.

It’s the perfect mixture of sophisticated and daft, isn’t it. Clearly they are expecting quite a lot of people to think the same, because it has an estimate of 900 swiss francs, which is over £600. Never mind.

Once I’d given in to that, I thought I might as well include this poster too, mainly on the grounds that it’s a kind of style that really the British never even attempted, and so I do hanker after it a bit.

It’s by the rather brilliantly named Kurtz Helmut, and isn’t dated, although it doesn’t really need one, and it could be yours for in the region of 500 francs.

Elsewhere, there are some bits and bobs of Barbara Jones available on eBay should anyone be interested. Exhibit A is a handful of original drawings, as brought to my attention by James Manning. This one is the best, mainly because of the dog.

The better treasure, for me at least, is a copy of Design for Death, which is a wonderful book and definitely worth buying in its own right (as I have explained at some length on here before). But how much better if it comes with this.

It’s Barbara Jones’ own Christmas Card from 1960, featuring two owls who bear more than a passing resemblance to Twit and Howlett. We do have the book, so I cannot possibly justify spending a minimum of £25 on one small card. But I am tempted.

Ashley Appeal

eBay

Today’s Friday special – and it is quite special – is brought to you by Ashley Havinden.

Unfortunately, the interior of the magazine finds it hard to live up to that cover. For a start, it is mostly in black and white – this is one of the few other bits of colour.

What’s more it is the run up to the 1955 Packaging Exhibition at Olympia and so the advertisers mostly want to tell us about their stands and their packaging in quite some detail. There are even some samples included.

Which is not to say that the magazine is not interesting. It would be worth the price of admission for this insight into the world of the travelling salesman alone.

But the articles in the magazine are considerably more progressive than the advertising. There are articles on both Donald Brun and Herbert Leupin to start with. Sadly they’re only illustrated in black and white, but here are a couple of the posters illustrated, re-found in colour.

And I can now also tell you that Donald Brun lived in a house which dated back to 1382. So there.

In addition, there’s an interesting ‘Designer’s Diary’ musing on contemporary design and functionalism, which managed to take in everything from toilet brushes and buses to an exhibition of catalogues. If I’m reading it right, I think the toilet brush is the winner.

I don’t know much about Sales Appeal, the phrase is so common as to be effectively ungooglable. I suspect it may be a later incarnation of Shelf Appeal, which was definitely around in the late 1930s, when both McKnight Kauffer and Tom Eckersley designed for it.

Which makes this picture from the magazine particularly pleasing, because I know how much it will appeal to the other Shelf Appeal. This is inside Simpsons of Piccadilly, whose main designer was Ashley Havinden. And if that wasn’t enough, there’s a cut-paper display to boot.

A very up to date shop display, apparently, and just look at how those shirts are wrapped.

King listing

eBay

All I seem to do at the moment on this blog is write about eBay. In part this is because I’ve got my head thoroughly stuck into writing a book instead, and so there isn’t much mental bandwidth left for thinking about posters. (A normal service will be resumed in due course, I promise). But it’s also because eBay keeps chucking wonderful stuff at me. Take a look at these.

What you are seeing there is a complete set of King Penguins, curently at £235 without having reached their reserve. But I don’t really mind what they sell for because the photographs – and obviously the books themselves – are artworks in their own right.

A comprehensive condition report which is at the same time a thing of beauty. I like that.

And this is just a small selection, there are loads more on the listing if you’d like to take a look.

While I’ve got your attention, you might also like to know about these posters.

Three late Tom Eckersleys, all with a starting price of £50, but be warned, the bids have started to come in already.

Without linen on backside

eBay, Uncategorized

At last. I’ve been banging on about PosterConnection’s shop on eBay for quite a while now – its selection is enough to persuade me to be interested in foreign posters every so often. Now, finally, they are also selling some British designs. And good ones too. Pick of the pops has to be this Daphne Padden.

They are asking about £250 for it, and I can’t work out whether that’s a reasonable price or not. This is mainly because the last time I saw one of these going past an auction was at the final Morphets sale, where the prices were definitely depressed by the sheer quantity of what was on offer. What is this worth? Do any of you lot know?

A few other British posters are on offer, of which my favourite is this poster by Harry Stevens from 1960.

Once again, there is also the chance to see Britain from the foreign point of view. Which can be quite different, because I definitely don’t remember Manchester ever looking like this. With the possible exception of the air colour, that is.

But I do rather like this cricketing lion.

He could almost be by Royston Cooper, but in fact he’s the work of one Host Buzas in 1960. Good show.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering about the title, that’s how all of these posters are described.

There’s good stuff elsewhere on eBay too at the moment. Perhaps most urgently, I need to point you at this Abram Games poster, which is a lovely joyful one without bullets or dead people or blood in it. I know that’s not his fault, he was working for the Army so it was part of the job description, but I do find the results quite hard work sometimes.

The bloke who is selling this had the experience which I can only dream of; they bought a new house and found a whole roll of these posters up in the attic. They’re in very good condition too. I know this for certain because we’ve already bought one, and very lovely it is too.

While we’re on the subject of attic finds, you might want to watch the Antiques Roadshow on Sunday, because a Scottish woman brought in fifteen Keep Calm and Carry On posters – story here, and indeed everywhere else. This brings the total known to exist to somewhere round about twenty and they are apparently worth £1,000 each; although how they’ve worked that out when no one has ever auctioned one before and the rip-offs are plastering the internet like bad grafitti I don’t know. And if they say on the show – as I am pretty sure they will judging by the news story – that they were produced for use in the event of invasion when this is not true I will shout at the television. So there.

Rant over, back to eBay. A couple of posters we are probably not going to buy are these two Festival of Britain designs. They are wonderful, but their prices are already soaring into the stratosphere with a couple of days to go.

Festival of Britain is such a lovely searchable term, isn’t it.

For those of us without a bottomless wallet there is both this Amstutz, from 1967 (the sellers has a number of other GPO posters but I can’t quite get excited about them).

And then this psychedelic oddity.

They’re both being sold abroad, so might not go for that much.

Finally, this is not a poster, but might be of interest to one or two of you.

I’d like to be able to draw just like that. Now off you go, I’ve got a television to shout at.