Posts - Page 88 of 96

A football, a train and a pint of milk.

other

I’ve been sent a couple of nice things recently by readers. (Only via email though. No real bribery has yet been attempted but please do feel free, posters particularly welcome.)

Anna pointed out that there was another Lewitt-Him children’s book out there, which she knew of as her mother had kept it from her own childhood. It’s The Football’s Revolt,

and it looks to be as lovely as the others.

There are a few more photos on the Flickr set if you like these. This is certainly the only way I’ll be looking at it, as prices on Abebooks start at £67 and from there only go up. It was published in 1944 under wartime restrictions, so I’m guessing there were never that many copies in the first place, hence the premium.

Patrick Tilley also got in touch after we featured some of his designs for AP. He’ll be the subject of a post or three in due course, but in the meantime, a reminder of what lovely stuff he was producing.

The agency (Mather & Crowther..?) removed my name from the border. Possibly because the slogan was theirs not mine.
They just asked for some coloured cut-out lettering and I obliged.

Amusingly, you can see the poster hard at work on a hoarding (centre, behind the blue Volkswagen van) in this still from The Ipcress File.

It’s the scene where Carswell is shot in his car, and if you want to know more (including Google Earth co-ordinates), it’s all here.

Paul Rennie, meanwhile has sent over the cover of a railway magazine. Fortunately this is better than it sounds.

It’s not a poster, it’s quite early and it’s by Victor Reinganum who was more of an illustrator than a poster designer, but it’s rather lovely so I’ve decided to show it anyway. Reinganum did design one poster for London Underground too, in 1950

so there you go.

Mr Rennie has also, very kindly, sent over a proof of his new poster book. But as this is both very big and very comprehensive (as well as being packed with lovely posters) I may take a while to digest it. But I will. In the meantime, here are a few pretty pictures for your entertainment.

Lewitt-Him, Post Early for GPO, 1941

God Save our Queen (original artwork), Barnett Freedman, 1953, 19 x 39″, Shell Mex & BP.

Boat Races, Anne Hickmott, 1959, panel poster, 10 x 12″, London Transport.

Sell me something, please

Posters, posters everywhere, but not a lot to buy

auctions

Well, it’s here. For the first time under the new rules (which are, as ranted about previously, a minimum lot value of £800) it’s the Christies May vintage poster auction. And, unsurprisingly, it’s not for me any more.

There are lots of cruise posters, some French posters, a fair smattering of Olympic posters, and lots more besides, but very little that I’d actually want to buy.

Perhaps the most interesting one for me is this Hans Unger Safari poster, mainly because I’ve never seen it before

This may also be true for Christies, because they don’t seem to have a date or a publisher for it. Anyone out there with any ideas?

There are also five lots of Lyons teashop prints, which you don’t often see, although I’m not sure whether this is because they don’t often come up, or because they more often make their appearances at Modern British Art sales. This 1947 one by William Scott is probably my favourite,

with Barnett Freedman a close second.

It’s worth noting that not even Barnett Freedman can make himself worth the minimum lot value, and for the estimate of £800-1,200 you get two Freedman prints for your teashop.

A few of the usual suspects are present, like these pair of McKnight Kauffers (estimates £1,000-£1,500 and £2,000-£3,000 respectively)

There is also this Bawden City of London Transport poster (estimate £700-£900)

Interestingly, this comes with six other London Transport posters when I would have thought that it would hold that value perfectly well by itself. I’d also be curious to know whether one of them is its pair poster, as this half is coming up more and more, but you never see the text side for sale. Perhaps I’d better ask Christies.

Further to yesterday’s post, there is also a David Gentleman pair poster,

For your £700-900, you also get its other half and two posters by the very under-rated Sheila Robinson, so a good helping of Englishness to be had there.

From the other side of the Channel, design-wise, this has also appeared.

I wonder if it was lured out by the Antiques Roadshow coverage. The estimate (£3,000-£5,000) is pretty much what they gave, so it will be interesting to see how that does.

In other news, the lot value restrictions haven’t entirely kept out the kitch as this

has an estimate of £600-800 despite being a bit grubby. I’ll be surprised.

And this Carvosso will probably go for at least its £800-£1,200 estimate for its curiosity/ephemera value.

While I admire its attempt to inject glamour into the roll-call of Manchester, Middlesborough, White City, I still don’t like it very much.

This, meanwhile, is just delightful.

It’s by D W Burley but also isn’t dated. But it’s still not £600-£800 worth of nice to me. So I shan’t be bidding.

This post is already far too long, but it’s also my duty to point out, as a grumpy under-bidder, that this Henrion went off on eBay yesterday for a mere £139.

One thing I really miss is knowing who has bought things. In the good old days of eBay, most of the time you’d be able to see who’d beaten you to a poster like this. But now – unless you’re selling it yourself – everyone has a cloak of invisibility which no computer wizardry can pull aside. And with Onslow’s now online rather than in the eccentric Festival-modern hall at Marble Arch, I can’t even go there and see for myself wh0’s won things. There’s no reason why I should know of course, but it’s still annoying.

A Gentleman and a poster designer

designers

Saturday’s Guardian has an interview with David Gentleman, in which he says he came to feel, apropos of his political works,

“that my outrage should have been channelled into posters, not shut up out of harm’s way in a book”.

I wish he’d just done more posters full stop.

By complete coincidence, I’d just been wandering through the Design Council Slide Collection on VADS, looking for posters which weren’t to do with railways or ROSPA or London Transport (another story for another day) and had pulled out a handful of his posters for the National Trust. Which are brilliant.

David Gentleman poster National Trust Camborne Beam Engine
1972 poster for the National Trust (and winner of a Poster Design Award to boot)

David Gentleman National Trust poster Knole gardens
1976 poster for the National Trust (apologies for the cropping, it came that way)

He also did some dramatic posters when the NT property of Petworth was threatened by a by-pass in 1976.

But perhaps his most outstanding achievement are the set of posters he designed for the Stop the War Coalition, which I think are amongthe best poster designs of the last twenty years in this country. Maximum emotional impact, minimum means.

(There’s a very good interview about these last posters in the AGI magazine, from which I learned that Gentleman also thought up the Bliar slogan as well as designing the posters. Really, he is a genius.)

But don’t let all that make you think that all he can do is dramatic protest. Here are two London Transport posters he also designed, one a pair poster from 1956

and the other from 1973.

And that is pretty much all I have been able to find. Which – given the quality of the ones that he did do – is a great shame.

Good Design

designers

For a change, let’s look at something which isn’t a poster.

Kathy Kavan’s post about Galt Toys design and branding (which I remember with great clarity from my own 70s childhood) led me to designer Ken Garland’s own website. It’s a treasure trove of delights, like these Design magazine covers from 1958-60.

It’s hard to imagine a government-sponsored quango (which the Council for Industrial Design was) producing anything as fresh and interesting as this now.

These covers for the Architectural Review meanwhile, from 1957 and 1959, still look irrepressibly modern.

David Carson himself would have been proud of these two.

But these last two aren’t very typical of Garland’s work which is, in the main, an understated and very British take on modernism. Whatever you think the story of British modernist graphics is – or isn’t – there’s a moment in the 1960s where the UK takes on board the mainstream of European graphic thought and makes it mainstream.

Poster for Committee of 100, 1961

Designers like Garland also add something new to the modernist mix though. There’s a lightness of touch and even a sense of humour which makes them distinctively British.

But go and take a look for yourself, it’s an exemplary website and archive with lots of interesting thoughts about the designs and the process which led to them, as well as the images themselves.

Advance poster warning

auctions

Today, a couple of odds and ends where nothing is happening yet, but will in due course.

Firstly, the Morphets site is trailing Part Three of the Malcolm Guest collection, which are the 2,000 or so (if my memory serves me correctly) post-1960 posters from the collection. Not as interesting to railway buffs, very interesting to Crownfolio. At the moment they are teasing us with just two tiny jpegs.

I know nothing of either of these posters, so if you can tell me who or what they are, I’ll be very grateful. In the meantime, Mr Crownfolio and I will start saving the pennies for July.

At the other end of the country, Wallis and Wallis are selling some more HMSO posters in early May. I blogged about the last sale, which included some interesting ATS recruiting posters.

Amazingly, those first twenty lots fetched almost £15,000 (full story here), which is fairly mindboggling, given how little these kind of posters used to go for just a few years ago. I also didn’t find them a desperately inspiring bunch either, but I am guessing they appealed more to WW2 collectors than poster/design collectors, so am perhaps not that well-qualified to comment.

The lots on sale in May will come from the same batch, which were apparently saved by a worker at a printing firm when he was asked to throw them out, hence their mint condition, but Wallis and Wallis aren’t giving away too many details yet, apart from the image above. More news as it happens.