Posts - Page 93 of 96

Sitting on the dock of the eBay

eBay

End of the week already, and so time for a workmanlike round up of what’s floated to the surface on eBay recently.

Exhibit A is this Littlehampton poster from the States, which is a bit battered but not beyond the work of man to restore (for something which is, see below). Following on from yesterday’s thoughts, I wonder how it got to the States, and how many Americans holidayed in Littlehampton rather than the Hamptons as a result?

It’s by Studio 7 (whose work has recently started to cross my radar, does anyone know anything about them?) and dates from 1960 says the National Railway Museum. Here’s their copy looking quite nice.

And it’s filed in America under Transportation Collectables/British Airways, so might not get that much notice, should you be hoping for a bargain.

Next, a 1960s/1970s London Transport poster, which is not bad, although would be better for not being the 1973 reprint with added text.

I can’t better the eBay description:

This is an original 1973 copy of the famous poster by well-known industrial photographer Dr Heinz Zinram. First issued in 1965 and then re-issued in 1973 with the added slogan ” First published 8 years ago; still true today”, it shows three versions of a street scene; the first full of cars, then the people from those cars on the street and, finally, one Routemaster bus which has soaked up all 69 people.

Its message would do as well today as in 1965 and 1973. So perhaps posters don’t work that well after all.

And finally, proving that a) everything which has a named designer is not necessarily gold and b) people will try to sell absolutely anything on eBay, a Daphne Padden poster. Or at least some of one.

Now Daphne Padden is an under-rated designer, but that poster is not typical of her normally much less traditional style:

Unlike the BEA one, this is wonderful stuff, and Padden deserves more appreciation than she currently gets. If you want to see more of her graphic style, there’s a good collection of her work on Flickr and not really anywhere else. A set (quite possibly this set) came up on eBay a couple of years ago, and the more I look at these, the more I wish we’d bought at least one of them. Especially the one above with the cat. Ah well, next time.

Four posters in search of a story

posters

I’ve always been interested in the afterlife of objects – how things survive long enough to become collectibles or heirlooms or even national treasures. It’s generally a story of chance and – quite often – being so lost and overlooked that no one bothers to throw you away. It’s also a story that isn’t often told as part of design history; once an object has been created and made, that’s normally the end of it. But often what happens next is at least as interesting, and can also be very revealing about how we appreciate, or disregard, the objects around us.

So, following on from yesterday’s post about just how little survives, here are a few of our posters with the tales of how they made it through to the twenty-first century.

Tom Eckersley, Post Early for GPO, 1955, Crown Folio 15″ x 10″
Saved by a man who went into his local post office and asked them to keep for him all of the posters and publicity material that they had finished with. (I will write more about this one of these days as it’s worth a whole post in its own right.)

F H K Henrion, Changing of the Guard for London Transport, 1956, Double Royal 40″ x 25″
Kept by a tutor in graphic design who used it in his teaching.

Mount/Evans, Anti-Smoking poster for COI, 1965-ish, Double Crown 30″ x 20″
Bought at auction but I believe it came from the designers’ own archive.

ARP Poster, Edward McKnight Kauffer, 1938, Crown Folio 15″ x 10″
Found in the roof of a scout hut. The air rifle pellet holes had to be restored…

Patrick Bogue from Onslows also mentioned in passing that he once found original railway poster artwork being used as insulation in a loft space. Can anyone better that?

Something fishy going on

designers

Now here’s a thing. To be precise, it’s a website about Macfisheries, full of pictures of pre-war shops and employee reminiscences. But it’s also got a fair smattering of the work of Hans Schleger, who designed pretty much the entire corporate identity for the food chain throughout the 1950s, from shop layout to packaging design and advertising.

To whet your appetite, here are some packaging designs (photos from the Hans Schleger exhibition at the V&A in 2007).

But what I really wanted to draw your attention to are the brilliant in-store posters that Schleger and his studio designed to be displayed in the shops.

I want to buy salmon, turkey and chicken right this minute. From a beautifully-designed shop please.

But these posters have got me thinking. Because I have never, ever seen one of these in the wild – at an auction or on eBay (and if anyone has, there’s a comments link below where you can tell me all about it at the bottom of this post).

One of the reasons, I suppose, that railway posters and London Underground posters have ended up being so collectable is that they are out there to be collected in the first place. Both the railway companies and London Transport did sell contemporary editions of their posters*. So pristine copies – however few – were kept and framed and had at least a fighting chance of surviving for longer than the duration of the advertising campaign.

Whereas, I’m guessing, the Macfisheries posters were put into a wet and rather smelly bin at the end of the week or month. And so now next to none survive, apart from perhaps the few above and those that Schleger himself kept and which are now at the National Archive of Art and Design (about whom I am going to grumble at length one of these days as they are absolutely inaccessible online). I’d imagine that as a result, they are quite valuable; then again, it might work the other way, as there’s no established market in them. I rather doubt that though.

* I once saw on eBay a 1930s poster advertising that London Transport posters could be bought at their 55, Broadway headquarters. Not only did I fail to buy it, I didn’t even keep an image of it, and now I can’t track it down at the London Transport Museum. Any clues, anyone?

Keep Ebay Tidy

eBay

Seeing as I was talking about Mount/Evans yesterday, here are a couple of Keep Britain Tidy posters which I believe are their work, or at least that of Reginald Mount. He definitely designed this one, anyway.

And this one is clearly a relation.

They’ve both just gone on eBay, for £34 and £38 respectively, very reasonable for a nice pair of 30″ x 20″ Double Crowns.

I’ll post properly about Mount/Evans another day. Although I don’t know a great deal about them (they worked for the Ministry of Information together in the war and then set up their own studio afterwards is about the long and the short of it), I can lay my hands on quite a lot of examples of the good stuff they did. And if anyone can tell me any more about their careers in the meantime, that would be great.

And of course the Quad Royal Twitter logo is a Mount/Evans design.

This particular poster was designed for government offices in 1960, but is another image that has gone viral across the web because it was included in the Cold War Modern exhibition at the V&A in 2008-9. But still, a useful motto for modern life, I think.

Dekk hands

designers

This great little GPO poster (a Crown Folio, naturally) was recently on eBay

as a Buy It Now (for £20, it didn’t last long).

From 1949, it’s by Dorrit Dekk, who, despite designing some iconic COI posters like this one

and some very smart later stuff too, such as this P&O menu design

isn’t as well known as she rightly ought to be.

But more than just posting some lovely images of her work (there are plenty more of her later designs on a nice Flickr set here), I also wanted to point you at an interesting, if slightly strange set of interviews with her.

They come from Your Archives, which is an attempt by the National Archives to create some Wiki-style content. The Dekk interview is part of a World War Two artists section, although it’s about the only bit of original content that I’ve managed to find in there. Most of the articles are just standard bios with link to relevant artworks in the archives. Which would be alright if the National Archives had any thumbnail images in there, but they don’t.

There’s a perfectly servicable biography of Dorrit Dekk included, so I won’t repeat what they can perfectly well tell you themselves, but her career included an apprenticeship in the COI under Reginald Mount and Eileen Evans, as well as designing for the Festival of Britain.

Amongst other things, she explains how Reginald Mount gave her the pen-name Dekk:

Now one day, when the printer came back to collect the art work for the first poster I did and I was still finishing it off. He said “Well, you haven’t signed it” and so I said “I hadn’t thought about signing it.” And then I had a problem. I said “My married name was Klatzow” – which was a Russian name – and in those days a foreign name would have been difficult and unpronounceable. K-L-A-T-Z-O-W: that would be fashionable now! I didn’t like my maiden name, Fuhrmann. So then, Reggie said “So what are your initials?” and I said “DKK” and so he said “There you are: DKK. We put in the E” and Dekk was a good thing because was easy to understand on the telephone. It was not like having to spell Klatzow or Fuhrmann and, written down, it was good for signing. And it looked foreign which was an advantage – I didn’t pretend to be English – but at least it sounded possible.

And how designing for the Festival of Britain was the fast-track to a career after the war,

…the fantastic thing about the Festival was that you met all the great designers because you always had meetings together: Misha Black and Jimmy Holland – of course I knew him by then – Henrion, Abram Games, everybody! Abram I must have met at one of those meetings. And without the Festival I wouldn’t have been successful – it was like a badge of honour. If you had been a designer for the Festival you had arrived. And I was quite young after all and I had no experience – just those two years at the COI. I mean I was green. And then after the festival, all the jobs came in. It was so easy to get commissions after that because I had met everybody and, if I approached people with my portfolio asking “Can I design anything for you?” I got new commissions.

But large swathes of the interview are dull, if not frankly borderline surreal. Instead of asking her more about what working in the C.O.I was like, or about her later work, the questions are about gouache, Tippex and paper quality instead.

A bit of digging around reveals that the purpose of the whole project (and hence the interview) is for conservators at the National Archives to

identify the paint and drawing materials (media) used by artists for propaganda artwork and illustrations during the Second World War.

Which I am sure is terribly useful for them, but a gigantic missed opportunity for the rest of us. Although I suppose that the lesson is that I shouldn’t rely on the journalistic nous of archivists and conservators if I want to find out about designers and their work.

Dorrit Dekk is still alive and working, incidentally. And if you want to buy one of her recent collages, they are available on eBay right now.