British post war posters and graphics.
See that poster? That’s me right now, so apologies if posting gets a bit erratic for the next week or two.
If you like what you see, it’s for sale on eBay at the moment, courtesy of PosterConnection. They’re selling some interesting things at the moment, so more about that tomorrow. Or perhaps the day after.
There has definitely been a change in eBay over the last few years, at least in terms of the poster market. When we first started watching it, most of what was up for sale wasn’t either of much quality or of much value. Think National Savings and posters which had been damaged beyond all reasonable repair. And quite often both.
Nowadays, though, it’s very different out there. What’s on offer can sometimes look more like a sample from a specialist poster auction than the scrapings from someone’s attic, although admittedly you don’t get to look at pictures of so many people’s floors in a proper auction.
It’s one of those weeks this week. So you could have a Guinness poster.
Or a high quality film poster by none other than James Fitton.
Although with a starting bid of £250, I shan’t be buying it. As the posters on offer edge up to auction quality, it seems the prices are doing the same. I’m less impressed with that, however inevitable it is.
For a £99.99 opening offer, you might also have this period railway poster, featuring a man with wonderfully spivvy dress sense.
Extra points for standing on the poster while you’re taking the photograph there.
You might also be interested in this gem (starting price £80) which is one of my favourite railways posters that we don’t own. Yet.
I spent several of my teenage years travelling in and out of Manchester Piccadilly for gigs, nightclubs and hanging around in shops without buying anything, so it has a great nostalgic appeal. Although I don’t remember the architecture looking quite that optimistic or even interesting after a couple of decades of unsympathetic adaptation and Mancunian smoke.
If it’s London Transport posters you are after, there is this bus stop poster by Harry Stevens. Again.
This keeps coming up, everywhere from eBay to Sotherans, and has probably been mentioned on here more times than any other single poster. I have no idea why there are quite so many of them about. Were they distributed to every London school child for the Silver Jubilee or something? Or were they just very easy to steal from bus stops? If anyone has a clue, please do share.
But all is not lost, some corners of eBay are just as they ever were. Would you like a 1960s RoSPA poster?
Please say you would. Because I’ve got a whole tube full of these to put up for sale one of these days, although probably with a starting price of less than £9.99.
There’s also still space for the oddities too, like this man in France who is mostly selling a vast array of posters about safety out on the airport apron which is really worth looking at just for curiosity value alone. The collection includes this British Airways safety poster, yours for the grand sum of €2.
My favourite, however, is this Air France one, also €2 if you fancy it.
Finally, there are the things that are more likely to come up in a junk shop or ephemera fair than an auction house, like a large set of BBC Schools leaflets or a Dorrit Dekk menu.
These reassure me. I’m really pleased it isn’t all tidied up and auction-like yet on eBay; life would be much duller if it were, and I wouldn’t know quite how many people had beige carpets. And we’d hardly be able to afford any posters at all ever. So long may it carry on like this.
This picture arrived in the Quad Royal inbox a few weeks ago.
A very lucky man called Brian Shepherd had found this trio in his loft. They’re mounted on board, and so it seems that they’d been used as trays to store apples and pears up there in the dark. A waste of some very fine posters if you ask me.
Now Brian emailed because he wanted to know a bit more about them. This one (my favourite and a bit of a psychedelic masterpiece if you ask me) is signed Dorrit Dekk.
The Beatles might be asking for a few royalties on this one, which is by Martina Selway. As far as I can tell, she seems to have done a lot of designs for the GPO and only a couple more for London Transport. But a surprisingly copious biography out there on the web reveals that this is because she then went into illustrating children’s books. So now we know.
Then there is the third, which is a bit of a mystery.
The signature is only a pair of initials which might say dy, or jy, or jl, to be honest it’s hard to say.
So the first mystery is who is this by?
Mr Shepherd is a bit of a sleuth, because he started to do some more research into the posters and even scoured the National Archives to see what he could discover. Which was that these posters were all commissioned in 1969. Which then raises another question, because 1969 was the year that the Post Office Savings Bank turned into the National Savings Bank. Which makes me wonder whether these posters were ever actually used – or is the change of name the reason why they ended up lining fruit trays instead? I’ve asked the lovely people at the BPMA, but they can’t shed much light on it. So if you know any more, please do get in touch, I’d love to know.
Even without that knowledge, though, they’re still a great set of posters; proof that not all artistic merit had fled from the poster by the end of the 1960s.
That’s not the end of it, either. If you want to buy any of these, he has put each of them up for sale on eBay. So if you’ve taken a shine to any of them, you now know where to go.
Odd times indeed on eBay. When I pointed out this poster last week, it was more for entertainment than investment value.
But it went for £104. Not so funny indeed.
I should have been less surprised that these two pieces of prime psychedelia went for £143 each. They’re by the wonderful Dan Fern and printer-fresh.
Although Mr Crownfolio and I had harboured hopes of picking one up cheap, mainly because these are the kind of things which can fall through eBay searches un-noticed. But not this time. (There were another two, which went for under £40 each, but still not cheap).
This Daphne Padden also sold very quickly for a Buy It Now price of £50.
I think I’d file that under interesting rather than desirable (much like the concept it’s advertising), mostly because it’s the first time I’ve ever seen that design and I had no idea that she had done much work for BR at all. So there you go.
As for what’s on sale at the moment, it is, as ever, a mixed old bag. Probably the most interesting are those being sold by medieval modernist, a name not unknown round these parts. This Henrion is, how shall I put this, unlike anything else I’ve ever seen of his by quite a long way and then some.
If you find that a bit frightening, this Salter is slightly more conventional.
And there’s plenty more in between, so go and take a look.
This poster wouldn’t be worth mentioning for itself, were it not for the person selling it.
I’ve mentioned this story before, but a seller on eBay, Kingchristopher, has been selling an incredible collection of leaflets, tickets, stamps, memorabilia and other ephemera for a very long time, all collected by his uncle George King. A long time before this blog existed, we bought a number of 1950s and 60s GPO posters from him: apparently his uncle used to go into the Post Office and ask to have the posters they’d taken down each week. Ones like this.
George King was clearly an interesting, if slightly obsessive man. Mr Crownfolio recently found out a bit more about him from a philately forum:
George King who was one of the great Philatelic hoarders of our time, and a man truly ahead of his own time.
From about 1908 to the 1950’s (?) he posted envelopes to himself to obtain examples of virtually every new special event or special purpose postmark issued by the GPO in the UK. (TPO’s Machine Cancels Exhibitions, Skeleton marks etc etc). If you ever see his name on a cover do some more research.
Often the postmark will be the first day of use or the last day of use. He would often send half a doz or more covers and now these are often the only examples known. He also kept copies of virtually every Post Office leaflet and label issued and quantities of associated Shipping and aviation leaflets etc.
His accumulation must have filled rooms not just boxes and when it first came on the market, I believe in the early 1980’s, it was a real eye opener and helped establish the dates of issue of many TPO’s and provided examples of otherwise unknown marks.
Its a shame that the entire accumulation does not appear to have been recorded before sale. I know that the family had some problems, being let down financially by some of those involved.
Today I believe a family member still sells some of the original covers and leaflets on eBay etc. If you see a 1930’s Brit GPO leaflet in “looks like it was printed yesterday” condition chances are its ex. George King.
I heard a rumour that in WWI he was interviewed by the Secret Service to find out why he was writing to the postie in charge of every British and many Australian NZ and Indian Army Post Offices to obtain examples of their FPO postmarks!
None of my relatives were so forward thinking sadly, although I’m not entirely sure I would like to have inherited the job for life that disposing of it all seems to have become for his nephew.
Other than that, the theme seems to be 1950s kitsch. This poster might be quite a nice buy were it not a) framed and b) in the States, so postage will be rather prohibitive.
This side of the Atlantic, you can have your kitsch in the form of tourism posters.
Or simply way bigger than you really need.
That’s nine foot by six foot of big, so don’t say you weren’t warned.
While eBay is still quiet after the holidays, there are a few things worth noticing up for sale at the moment. Of which my favourite are these musical instrument posters.
There are nineteen of them altogether, and they were produced, so the listing usefully notes, between 1946 and 1949, with the editor of the series being the Director of Music for the Royal Military School for Music. I’m guessing they were intended for schools, not least because they have the same format as the Shell Educational series, with integral black metal hangers at top and bottom. They’re all good, but my favourite is this, the invisible man plays the tuba.
They are all priced at 99p, and as things stand there isn’t a single bid on any of them, so a bargain awaits.
The other British offerings are more interesting for their historical curiosity than any aesthetic appeal. The Fritter Fly must have been designed as a post-war successor to the Squanderbug, but never quite achieved the same fame.
Despite being lovingly framed, this has just failed to sell at £50, so you could always make the seller an offer. Which is more than you might want to do with this one.
Yet again, proof that the art of the poster was well and truly dead (and buried with the coffin fully nailed shut) by 1973.
Moving swiftly on officer, there are also a couple of items from outside our normal stomping grounds. Shall we start with this painting?
It’s by Theyre Lee Elliott, who produced wonderful posters before the Second World War, and then concentrated more on his paintings after that. Just £49 if that’s your sort of thing. Mine, it has to be said, is his posters.
Finally, a quick reminder that PosterConnection are still trundling along on eBay, selling industrial quantities of European posters in their shop. Of the current stock, this Austrian design from 1954 is the one I like the best.
Even though I know that this, by Donald Brun, is probably a ‘better’ poster.
Comedy award, however goes here.
There’s something about the combination of the phrase Schutzmarke with underwear that my inner seven year old can’t resist. Even though it’s not really funny at all. oh no.
I’ve spent too much time standing in queues and having a nervous breakdown in toyshops recently to have kept a much of an eye on eBay. Mostly that doesn’t matter, as it’s been winding down for Christmas. But I did miss out on mentioning one interesting set of posters.
As you can see, I’m using the word interesting in an academic rather than visual sense here, but these posters are worth a mention nonetheless.
What was on offer was a set of four 1950s advertising posters, all for local businesses in the Guildford area.
Once again, eBay has turned up a very different slice through graphic design history than the one which usually turns up in the books or the auction houses. This is the ordinary, everyday world of the poster, a world where a Tom Eckersley, Henrion or Abram Games design would stand out as a gem in amongst, well, posters like these.
I’m not saying they’re great, I’m not saying they should be collected. But we should, always, notice them when they turn up in order to remember that they existed (probably in great numbers too).
In case you’re interested, they all went for between £10 and £20, with the camping poster below the most expensive.
And for once it wasn’t us who bought any of them.