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.
I’m feeling a bit guilty about this one. I didn’t get round to mentioning an auction in Marseilles last week as there was too much else on. Well, I thought, people aren’t actually likely to bid, as it’s a long way away, in French and the postage will cost a fortune.
What mainly interested me was not just that a few British posters had cropped up in an auction on the far side of France, but also that, once again, it was the airline posters which were appearing.
This anonymous BEA one, even though I haven’t seen it before, is perhaps the most standard in its blue-sky thinking. While the only place I’ve ever seen the one below is on the cover of Paul Rennie’s Modern British Posters
It’s by Kenneth Rowntree and from 1957 should you be minded to know.
This one, by Adelman and from a year earlier, is just plain odd.
What is it advertising? Televisions and rock drills? And why?
Just a warning though, not all BEA posters were artistic masterpieces, even as early as 1953.
As further evidence, I could also present this too.
But do not despair, the hidden gem of the collection has to be this, an Eckersley design for Aer Lingus which is definitely new to me. Has anyone else seen it before?
All of which brings me to my error. There are some lovely posters here, and I thought that they would all sell easily. Not so – in fact far from it. Of the five above, the only one to do remotely well was the Rowntree, which reached €250, well over its €120-150 estimate. None of the others sold at all, not even the Eckersley (est. €180-220). So perhaps someone should have had a go.
I don’t think it’s just that the French don’t like British posters, because this French representation of Britain didn’t sell either.
So lets not take this personally.
Mr Crownfolio has been diversifying into ephemera again. But I can’t really complain when it’s as good as this. And anyway, we haven’t had a nice Eckersley on the blog for a while.
But this isn’t some niche piece of design for a high-end firm. What we have here is a popular leaflet produced by a giant nationalised industry. I can’t think of anyone working in a similar way today. Which is more than a shame, to me that represents a loss of respect for other people – respect for their intelligence and taste, but also a respect in terms of making the world better looking rather than uglier. And that’s quite something to lose.
A bonus extra today. I almost lumped this little treasure in with yesterday’s eBay news, until I decided that it deserved a post all its own.
Not that I have a huge amount to say other than this is rather wonderful.
It is a portfolio of posters from about 1965, designed by Bob Gill (there’s a good interview with him here too) with words by Keith Botsford and printed by the Curwen Press. So top notch stuff, which just happens to be designed for children.
There are nine posters in total (or at least there are nine posters in this portfolio, perhaps there were more originally).
The instructions are pretty self-evident: arrange the posters to make the parade of your choice.
With my design head on I think its fantastic; from a more parental point of view I also wish we could still buy things as idiosyncratic as this now. I sometimes think we under-estimate what children can take in these days. Here are some 1960s children enjoying it for the benefit of the camera.
Right now it is on eBay, although just for another day and a half, and with a starting price of about £65. So we probably won’t be buying it, but I am very glad to have seen it anyway.
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.