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Thirty thousand pounds.

For what is, in the end, just a piece of printed paper.

I know I’m a fine person to be saying anything of the sort, but it does seem a bit absurd.  Mind you, I’m possibly think that £20,000 for this Dupas is even more absurd, because I do quite like the Bayer.

That had an estimate of £7,000-9,000, which gives you a pretty good index of how Christies Friday poster sale went.  Most of the lots I was watching went for way over their estimate, including the idiosyncratic Polunin which I blogged about a few weeks ago.

Writing about it made me look at it carefully, and I decided I rather wanted it.  Perhaps for the low end of its £700-900 estimate though; definitely not so much that I was prepared to pay over £2,000.

So are there any conclusions to take from this wild flurry of spending?  In some ways (and despite the fact that we could afford nothing at all as a result) I’m quite pleased to see posters going for high prices again.  In the last few sales I’ve watched, things have been pushed to even reach their estimates.  Whether this was a result of the recession, or a sign that the poster collectors market had reached its peak was hard  to judge. Whatever the reason though, it wasn’t a problem this time round.  Of course this may just be a blip – the bidding madness engendered by a really good collection can’t be disregarded – so we shall have to see where the next few sales take us.

Mark Severin, 1938, fetched £4,000

Mr Crownfolio – who watched the whole thing go by on his computer as he worked – thought that the sale also marked an interesting change in taste.  For once the countryside scenes didn’t seem to be the ones fetching the high prices; instead the metropolitan posters were doing better.  So this little Austin Cooper bunny only fetched £250, well below its estimate.   (Now I am really surprised about this, although given my prediliction for posters of slightly fey animals, I may not be the best person to judge.)

While T.S. Eliot on an overstuffed armchair below fetched £4,000 – when it had been estimated to go for less than the Cooper.

Mr Crownfolio suggested that perhaps this means that there is a new set of collectors coming into the market, urban professionals who like modernism and cityscapes rather than those – whoever they were – who wanted restful rural scenes.  It’s an interesting thought, and we shall see if the trend holds.

In other news, size isn’t everything.  This, which is by Percy Drake Brookshaw in his less lurid phase, doesn’t even measure 12″ x 20″ but went for £1,250.

I’d say the football connection might be driving the price up, but then this similarly-sized Charles Paine went for £3,500 too.

I rather like the disclaimer, presumably to stop Oxonians complaining that Cambridge were in the lead.

While we’re here, I also failed to notice this rather good Norman Weaver in the tail end of the lots.  It’s more stylised than most of his work and rather pleasing on the eye.

It went for £1,000 – over estimate once more.

Which leads me to my main conclusion for the day.  Lots of people have way more money than we do to spend on posters.  Any other thoughts, anyone?

I don’t know why I didn’t include this in Friday’s post.

It’s a recent acquisition, and it’s by

It had only arrived earlier in the week too, so there really is no excuse.  Except perhaps for the fact that it doesn’t look, to my knowledge, anything like any other poster he did, so I forgot it was by him.  In fact, as Mr Crownfolio pointed out, it doesn’t look much like an English poster at all.

It also doesn’t look much like it’s advertising televisions, I keep thinking of cruises every time I look at it.  Which is perhaps why KB Television didn’t survive. But I rather like it.

These children’s books just won’t leave me alone right now.  I still have Tom Eckersley’s Animals on Parade and John Burningham’s lovely London Transport poster work on the list of things to write about here (depending on an appointment with the scanner and an Amazon book order respectively), but as if that isn’t enough, another whole treasure trove has just arrived by email.

A while ago, I posted some images from The Vegetabull, the picture book written by Jan Le Witt, one half of the Lewitt-Him partnership, as a spin-off from their classic wartime poster.

I wasn’t a huge fan of the published book, which didn’t seem to have the verve of the original, but didn’t think any more of it.  Until I saw this.

Which is one of the original layout roughs for the book done by Le Witt and Him together, with George Him’s artwork.  Here’s the title page as well.

George Him’s step-daughter Jane very kindly sent them over in response to the original blog piece, along with an insight into what had happened.

The book designs were one of the very last things that Jan Le Witt and George Him worked on together, as their partnership broke up in 1954.  In the dividing up of work which followed, Jan Le Witt must have taken over the Vegetabull commission – I’m guessing it had already been contracted, as the title page above credits Harcourt Brace.

But the roughs are very different to the book that Jan Le Witt eventually produced, so much so that I can’t even begin to match the spreads from the published book to their equivalents in these designs..

For all I know they may not even illustrate the same story.

But they’re fascinating to look at even without the plot, not least as an insight into the working process.  Some are very rough – and all the more delightful for it.

While others are well on the way to becoming finished illustrations.

There’s an ironic twist to the story as well, because although Jane had known the book roughs for a long time, she had thought that was the end of it.  It was only when Ruth Artmonsky came to visit her in the course of researching her book on Lewitt Him and pulled out a copy of Jan Le Witt’s published book that she had any idea that something had become of them.

All of these designs, along with the rest of George Him’s archive, are now in the Archive of Art and Design at the Victoria and Albert Museum, so you can, in theory, pop in and see them for yourself.  (One day I will try and get my head round what is in the V&A and their holdings and how to access them on your behalf, but it’s a task of such mind-aching complexity that I keep finding something else to do instead).

This much later sketch of a bull by George Him is probably in there too.

Should you fancy a much easier life than trying to find things in the V&A, there is a comprehensive and useful website about his life and work here.

And if you want a copy of the Le Witt book, it can be got for a very reasonable £15 or so.  As a mint copy is going elsewhere on Abebooks for close to £100, that seems like a very good deal indeed.

Ages ago, when I last wrote about the Shell educational posters, I mentioned the wonderful designs of Tristram Hillier as being perhaps my favourites of the whole bunch.  And now a few of them have come up on eBay.

In total, the seller has five of Hillier’s wondeful designs  for Nature Studies on offer, advertised as “will look superb in your country kitchen or seaside holiday cottage”.  Or possibly for your long dark night of the soul.

Because these posters are strange and mysterious, disconcerting rather than decoration.  Here’s his design for moths from the same series.

Even without having the text to tell you that one of the caterpillers is that of the death’s head moth, the picture is still ominous enough.

It’s hardly surprising, though.  Hillier started out as a surrealist painter, and a member of Unit One along with Paul Nash, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, and Edward Wadsworth.  Like Nash in particular, he created a very British take on surrealism.

Tristram Hillier, Pylons, 1933

But his peculiar genius was to take reality and imbue it with the strangeness and clarity of his early paintings.  It’s a very disconcerting mixture.  Here’s a still life from 1950.

And it’s precisely this pecularity which he brings to his Shell designs.  Mind you, whoever commissioned him knew what they were doing when they gave him ‘Fossils, Insects and Reptiles’ as his subject.  Here’s Minerals (June) and Snails (December).

To make the ordinary extraordinary and strange is a rare gift; for me these paintings are so much more than just poster designs.

Clearly I’m not the only one to think so either.  This is Fossils (February).

which, in a way, belongs to every single one of us (if you’re British, that is) because it’s the property of the Government Art Collection.  And thanks to the quirkiness of the internet, I can even tell you that they paid £14,100 for it.  (The painting was sold as part of quite a big sale of Shell Artwork in 2002, and Sotheby’s still have the catalogue online.  I’ll come back to that one of these days as it’s quite an interesting insight into these posters and Shell’s thinking, which was quite outside the poster mainstream.)

If you like these as well, you don’t have to buy them on eBay.  The next Onslows Sale (and yes, I will take a look at the catalogue in the next few days) has Minerals for sale (lot 137).

The estimate is £60-100, and if that feels like a lot, then you can always buy the book.  Shell Nature Studies: Fossils, Insects and Reptiles, starts at just £5 on Abebooks.  Unrefusable.

When I wrote last week about my morbid fear of copies, and how it would infuriate Walter Benjamin, I didn’t expect to generate a debate.  But lots of people made very interesting comments, which have made me think more about how and why we buy posters.  But that’s for another day.

Today is a slightly more nerdy affair, as I am rather amused to report that I can address some of the more, um, detailed points about reproductions vs originals.

‘mm’ asked,

Have you ever had an LT reproduction next to an original? How different are they? Same size? Same paper? Same printer? Why indicate that it is a reproduction?…

Strangely enough, I am able to answer some of these questions, and this is our subject.

It’s a 1964 poster by William Fenton, advertising the collection of London Buses on show at the Museum of British Transport in Clapham High Street.  (This was the forerunner of both the York Railway Museum and the London Transport Museum; the site is now a Sainsburys, fact fans).

To my surprise – given that it is a rather detailed picture of old bits of machinery – we seem to have two copies of this poster.  One is an original,

the other the self-proclaimed reproduction.

To be honest there isn’t a whole heap of difference between them.  The colour – particularly the background pink and reds – is slightly different, being a bit more orange in the reproduction.

The paper is also slightly different, but not in a way that I could definitively say was better or worse, most likely just a factor of 7 or more years elapsing between the original and the reprint.

I wouldn’t be able to make a judgement, were it not for the fact that they’ve printed THIS IS A REPRO over it in screaming capitals.  In which case it’s easy, I’ll take the one on the right.  And as for mm’s last question, why do that, I have no idea, absolutely no idea at all.

Paul Rennie also suggested that they might have over-printed the original posters for sale at the museum, but looking at these two, I don’t think it’s the case.  These both have different serial numbers in the bottom left corner, and the reproduction has an (R) after its as well.

But what I do think they did was go back to the original printers for reprints of each poster.  The Fenton poster was printed, in both cases, by the Curwen Press.

This reproduction of a 1967 Graham Clarke original (I am rather embarrassed about the numbers we seem to have) was printed by  Johnson, Riddle and Co.

And a quick glance at the London Transport site tells me that the original was too.

Next week, back to why we collect posters anyway.  (Short answer, because I can’t afford a Picasso; the long answer will involve French sociologists and a bit more theory.  Bet you can’t wait.)