Posts - Page 90 of 96

The cut-throat world of poster selling

eBay

Not so much a post today as an observation of the minefield which is eBay.

This man, Paulsnumbers, is selling some railway posters. My favourite is the Bromfield of Swanage:

although I do also quite like this one too:

But then I am always a sucker for that kind of lettering.

He clearly disagrees with me as he’s only put these two on for a start price of £290, whereas this Skegness poster is starting at £350

And this of Weymouth at a somewhat surprising £380.

I am rather afraid that he is going to be disappointed with all of these. But then it’s hard to feel that he’s done himself any favours with these listings.

For a while now, I’ve been meaning to write some kind of guide on how to sell a poster on eBay; I’m going to have to start it now, as unfortunately Mr Paulsnumbers not merely broken a couple of these rules but then stamped quite thoroughly on their shattered remains.

The first commandment is Thou Shalt Photograph Thy Posters Very Well, so well in fact that you need to feel that your viewers are thoroughly bored and think you are a rather picky and unappealing person. But if I’m going to spend over £200 on eBay (doesn’t happen very often, believe you me), I’d like to think that I’ve seen every potential fold, stain, tear and blemish that a poster has, so that I know what I’m getting myself into. A single blurry and reflective photo of a framed poster doesn’t quite do that for me. (I’ve also done him a few favours with the cropping here; on the original pictures I got to find out more about his wallpaper and curtains than I strictly needed to know).

The second rule is, don’t start your prices too high, as it just puts people off. I don’t quite know why the psychology of this works (any suggestions?), but it definitely does. Perhaps, as I put my £300 bid on, I like to think that there’s a chance that I might get it for a bargain, then get psyched into spending more than I meant. This probably applies to all auctions, but it’s particularly important on eBay, because your start price determines your listing fees too, so you’ll pay over the odds for starting higher than you have to. Mr Crownfolio and I tend to start most of our posters on at £9.99; the prices almost always go up to about what we’d hoped.

Thirdly, it’s not often the case that you’ll get the highest price on eBay. I’ve only been able to track one of these posters down in an auction, and that’s the Skegness one, which sold for £375 at Christies in 2007. I don’t think the price will have gone up since then (see ramblings, passim) either. But then there are always some exceptions, so perhaps he’ll be lucky.

We shall see. In the spirit of information I should also tell you that he’s selling a few film posters (at similar fuzziness and prices) should you be interested. More bizarrely, he’s also selling batteries, razor blades and toothbrush heads. Go figure.

Update – 6/4. Not one of the posters was sold; quite a few of the razor blades and toothbrushes did.

There’s no escaping this

other, posters

Not with BBC iPlayer, there isn’t. So for those of you who managed to be out there having a life on Sunday evening, and thus are still skipping around with joy in your hearts and a twinkle in your eye, here is five minutes of television to turn your gills green with envy.

It’s the Antiques Roadshow (available there for another 4 days or so).

At about 52 minutes in, you will find a man who accidentally bought 100+ vintage travel posters for 50p as an eleven year old. Watch away, then feel free to whine and gnash your teeth along with me in the comments box. And also tell me whether or not you think the valuation is just a bit on the high side.

For those of you who are outside the UK and thus barred from the wonder that is the BBC iPlayer, here is an executive summary. Man goes to auction as 11 year old, buys nondescript roll of paper which is part of job lot, ends up with 120 or so travel and other posters. There were only 9 of his haul on show on the programme; starting with two liner posters that I’m not that fussed about, but then moving on to two Frank Newboulds for the GPO, one of which was a close relative of this one, if not identical, and neither of which I’ve ever seen before.

Then there was a McKnight Kauffer of Buckingham Palace.

And four posters by Jean Dupas, all of which look to me like book covers for Evelyn Waugh novels,

but which are, if you want to be a bit nerdy about them, noteworthy for having the very short lived LPTB logo on them (public demand soon brought back the roundel).

Interestingly, all of these posters date from 1934. Even more interestingly, if you’re the owner, the show’s expert valued them at £30,000+. (I’d quite like another opinion on that, especially these days. Or maybe she buys all her posters from Mayfair dealers.) Then that was it, and we’re back to Fiona Bruce for another lame link.

There, now it’s just like you watched the programme, isn’t it?

Shine a light

eBay

This was sold on eBay on Friday.

From 1944, it is a lovely piece of Hans Schleger/Zero in prime linen-mounted condition. Mr Crownfolio and I did have rather deluded hopes of picking it up for a pittance, seeing as it was being sold in the States. But it went for nearly £250 – unsurprisingly – which means that I can bring myself to tell you that the same seller has another one from the series on offer this week.

In a way, I’m not really upset that we didn’t get the first poster. It’s a classic, but I’m not sure I like it enough (certainly not £250 of enough). Would it ever get framed and hung on the wall? I don’t think so.

One of the reasons is that it may be a classic World War Two London Transport poster, but I’m not sure it’s a classic Schleger. His posters are usually either a bit stranger, or at very least a bit wittier, like this GPO poster from just a year or two later (known in our house as the ‘Prawn Chef’).

I wonder if there is a reason why his London Transport posters are so sensible. Because the other thing that has struck me about the two offered on eBay is just how much they resemble other designers’ work on the same themes – and how much they all resemble each other.

Here’s Tom Eckersley on the other side of the question – reminding bus drivers to stop when they are hailed in the blackout.

And also reminding the drivers to save rubber.

While James Fitton (whose work really does deserve more appreciation than it gets) informs the travelling public that they too can help save this precious wartime commodity.

And finally, we’re pretty much back at the beginning again, as Fitton also tells us how not to flag down a bus during the blackout.

Two things strike me from this series. One is what a great designer James Fitton was, in particular for his luminous use of colour. His posters easily stand up to the work of both Eckersley and Schleger.

The other – which was the thought that started all of this off – is that, for such a diverse set of designers, the results do have more in common than I would expect. This is mainly in the way that they’ve all used a simplicity of technique, each poster illustrating the issue fairly literally with no visual puns or distracting images. I wonder whether, somewhere in the heart of the London Transport wartime archives, there is a memo which says: This is war. And safety. So don’t let the designers get away with any of their clever-clever stuff. Oh, and on the way out, make sure you give them an airbrush. Perhaps I should write to the London Transport Museum and ask.

Operator, I can’t find anything

archives

I’ve been meaning for a while to do a series of posts looking at the different archives that sit out there on the web, just waiting for you to rummage through their files of wonderful vintage posters. These resources have exploded in the last few years, and it’s now easy to find out incredible amounts about the history of posters without ever leaving your chair – the kind of research that would have taken years and many many train journeys in the past, even had it been possible at all. So, while the archives may not be making me fitter, I am certainly now both better off, and considerably more informed than I would otherwise have been. Hurrah for the internet.

My thoughts were that I’d start with one of the straightforwardly brilliant ones, like the London Transport Museum catalogue – a complete itemisation of every poster and artwork they own, image-led, designed for users rather than museum curators. But in fact, I find myself wanting to begin with two really quirky ones. So today’s is the BT archive, which until a couple of weeks ago, I didn’t even know existed.

Pieter Huveneers Telephone poster
Pieter Huveneers, c1950.

The archivist at the BPMA very kindly pointed me in their direction, because the two collections are separated siblings. When British Telecom was split off from the GPO in 1980, they got the posters about telephones and telegraphs, and the Post Office got the ones about letters. But the artists, the poster sizes and even the cataloguing systems are very much the same.

Zero, 1944, TCB 319/PRD 375

That, sadly, is where the resemblance ends. The BPMA catalogue interface is lovely; it’s reasonably intuitive, I can find what I am looking for with some confidence, and all of the pictorial material is illustrated. The BT catalogue is, if I am entirely honest, a pig. The search logic follows its own rules, there is a wierd link called “ContextRef” which throws up an apparently random list of related material (which then defaults to the search page if you click on anything), and, worst of all, only about 10% of the material is illustrated. What’s particularly annoying about that is that, in researching this, I’ve found a company who claim to have had the contract to digitise the entire BT archives. So where have all these pictures gone then? Although, on the plus side, I did find this 1948 Eckersley on their blog, and I swear I’ve never seen it before (if you have, please do say in the contact box below).

But, as you can see, I have spent rather longer than I intended sifting through page after page of slightly dry records (I don’t, I have to say, like reading catalogue numbers) in search of the few illustrations that do exist. Because the few that are there are wonderful. This wartime Henrion is particularly wierd – I’d like to find out more about him, some of the images are really quite disconcerting.

Although this one, from 1951, is quite benign.

Then, after the best part of an evening reading ContextRef numbers and swearing, I found out how to buck the system. Some, and quite possibly all the images are available through the BT image sales website. Which is organised by picture, and theme, making finding images less of a needle in a haystack hunt.

Reiss telephone less vintage gpo poster
Reiss, 1945

There are disadvantages, like the fact that there are rather more pictures of trimphones and Busby than there are posters, and the images are watermarked.. But it does at least, in the advertising and wartime sections, give you a rough overview of what kind of posters the GPO was producing and whether or not you might want to look at some more.

This isn’t the first time I’ve used the image sales get round; for a long time, the only way to find out what posters the National Railway Museum held was to go via the Science and Society website. The NRM now do have a searchable online catalogue (of a railway buff kind) which is better than the slightly random selection that Science and Society used to dole out. But if you’re searching an archive through image sales (do you hear me V&A as well?) it’s a sign that they could, possibly, do more towards making them available on the web.

Moan over. So here’s one last nice poster to cheer ourselves up, a faultless Unger from 1951. Pip pip.

AP2 Part Two

other

Today, a second helping of the AP2 Artists Partners book. (Is it a brochure? a catalogue? I’m not entirely sure how to address it).

I ran through a few of the obvious highlights by the big names like Hans Unger, Saul Bass and Tom Eckersley last time, but there are plenty more treasures for your entertainment.

In fact, the sheer quantity of other stuff is one of the notable things about the book. Most of what would now be seen as the big names are in the creative design section, but there are six other categories in the book, including realistic figure, humour and whimsy (section cover by Reginald Mount)

fashion and sophistication, photography ( a wonderful graphic by Heinz Kurth)

scraperboard, still life and industrial,

and finally architecture, landscape and nature.

It’s a reminder, once again, how easy it is to recreate the past in terms of what we like best now. For every classic bit of graphics, one equal and opposite bit of kitsch was created (although this is not just any old figure illustration kitsch, it’s Artist Partners kitsch by Rix).

Good to know that about the dripping, too.

But that’s not to say that there aren’t some stylish things in the other categories too, such as this Christmas card for ABC Television, by Bruce Petty.

Or once again, Patrick Tilley, this time with a cover for a Shell almanac, filed under Humour and Whimsy. No one would ever admit to doing whimsy any more, would they, it’s hardly cool; I think that’s rather a shame.

Patrick Tilley is, incidentally, not only still alive but has spent the last forty years working as a scriptwriter and science-fiction novelist, rather than as a designer. Perhaps that’s why his work has rather disappeared off the radar, despite being really rather good. (And he’s got in touch with the blog too, which is very exciting, so there may well be some more of his work on show here in due course).

Almost as strange as that career change are these two window displays by George Him, for De Bejenkorf (which seems to be a department store in Amsterdam). The first one in particular, looks almost impossibly modern.

The second is just brilliantly odd.

More of this kind of thing please.

Even all this hasn’t exhausted the almost bottomless reserves of this book. So, next time the scanner and I get some quality time together, there will further delights to come.

The Shell Guide to auctions

auctions, posters

Not that long ago, I mentioned the Shell Educational posters in passing, with the intention of saying more about them one of these days.

But I’ve been rather pre-empted by the appearance of a whole group of them at auction on Thursday. (At first glance, I thought they were being sold by Alan Partridge Auctioneers, but sadly that isn’t the case).

Dorset Shell educational poster John Nash
Dorset, by John Nash

What’s on offer are four lots of the ‘County’ posters, each with five or six posters in each, all carrying an estimate of £60-100, and all photographed having a bit of a lie down.

Sussex Shell educational posters SR Badmin
Sussex, by SR Badmin

As well as a set of twelve Shell Guides to the countryside by Edith and Rowland Hilder.

Now, with my collectors head on, Shell posters can be very variable. They’re on gloss paper, which yellows and spots and then yellows some more. Plus at top and bottom they have black metal hangers which rust at the first possible opportunity, and also means that you can’t really put them in a frame. Having said all of that, a good one is still a lovely thing to have around the home (David Gentleman’s Ridgeway Path being my ornament of choice). And of course, because they come in sets, they bring out the worst of my collecting impulses.

With my thinking about posters brain engaged, they are interesting, not least because I’ve never seen anything written about them. They’re really a class apart, as almost all the artists who were commissioned are better known as illustrators rather than designers.; there’s more overlap between these posters and Ladybird books than there is with the rest of poster design. But some of them are beautiful, some – mostly by Tristram Hillier who was a surrealist artist when not producing these – are weird and strange, plus they are jolly informational things to have hanging on the wall. About which I will write properly another day.

Should you be interested, you can bid via the-saleroom.com if you don’t fancy the trek to Congleton.