Abram Games Archives - Page 8 of 9

If you have to ask, you can’t afford it

eBay, other

Often, I end up writing about posters on here that I, for one, can’t afford. Like the Royston Cooper Hastings that I mentioned last week, which is fantastic, but at £1000 a pop, I’m probably never going to own it. I’ve always rather fancied this 1951 Abram Games design too.

But as it was last sighted going for £850 at Morphets, it’s unlikely to be making an appearance on our walls any time soon.

Here, however, is something which puts all of that into perspective. Something so expensive that they don’t even dare tell you the price.

Perhaps I’d better let them describe it.

This outstanding collection of original vintage posters includes many Countries, all Periods, all Topics, all Styles, and most Artists. For major poster designers represented, see the ARTISTS page. This is an ensemble of finest Graphic Designs, covering Graphic History since its beginnings. It is a unique investment opportunity for Museums, Universities, Corporations or Private to establish or complete a significant collection.

(And I’m sorry, but I can’t help hearing that paragraph spoken by a snappily-dressed Russian meercat. Simples.)

What they mean is 25,ooo posters. Although only (only!) 17,000 different ones if you discount the duplicates. How would you even know which were duplicates if you had that many posters? I forget what posters we own, and ours all fit under the spare bed.

They look like this.

And this.

And so on and so on.

If you want to see the full extent of what you’d get for your un-named price, they have their own website here.

They’re the collection of Eric Kellenberger, a Swiss architect who started collecting posters in the late 1960s as a cost-effective way of providing art for his clients’ walls. (I seem to remember my own excuse for beginning to buy posters being some similar thing about value for money art; a rationalisation that is blown out of the water by the sheer number of posters that we now own but don’t display.)

Apart from being rather overwhelmed by its sheer size, I don’t have a lot to say about this, mainly because it’s almost entirely foreign. So much so that the BOAC poster above (c1955) is the only British one I could confidently identify. There is also a Jersey one, which I can’t find elsewhere, and another with a Kangaroo urging me to Buy Australian Sultanas, which I can live without. Both the dog and the kangaroo look a bit threatening, if you ask me.

The artist list also mentions Zero, but I can’t see any images.

But it’s probably a good job it’s all foreign, because I doubt I could afford to buy one of these, never mind twenty-five thousand. Anyone else up for it?

Meanwhile elsewhere on the web, a classic pre-war railway poster is up for auction on eBay.

It falls into the category of picture of a train where they want you to see its workings, which makes it quite valuable, if not generally my cup of tea. But its auction history tells a little story about perceived value and eBay.

Firstly the seller, posterisland, put it on for Best Offer, with a guide price of £2,250. Funnily enough, no one bought it.

They probably thought that they were being reasonable, as the poster did go for £2,200 at Morphets (and £1,900, and £1,800; he had three…). But that was for near-perfect nick; this one is a bit battered. And it’s on eBay.

Then they tried again, as an auction with a £99.99 start price, but also a £1,750 Buy It Now. Then someone must have told him something because he took it off again twenty minutes later.

Now it is up for auction again, with a start price of £99.99, no scary Buy It Now price, and it has three bids. And I suspect it will go quite a bit higher by the time it finishes today. Although possibly not quite as high as the seller would like. We shall see.

If you do bid and are disappointed, though, I can offer some consolation.

The chance to do it in cross stitch. Kits available online. There is nothing I can add to that.

Sell me something, please

Fun and Games

eBay

Nice and simple today. A high quality poster, in good condition, on sale on eBay.

Here it is, not occluded by the frame as it is in their picture.

It’s a very high quality item* to come up on eBay, and so I’m guessing that the price will end up being rather more than its current £3.45 when it ends on Sunday. Either that or someone’s about to get the bargain of the century. Watch that space.

*People probably do hold back from buying on eBay, especially when something looks as good as this does, fearing that it will be a reprint or a fake. It’s a fair point, especially considering how many modern prints. fridge magnets and postcards come up every time you search. But eBay are getting stricter these days, and the dealers are getting wise to this. So any reprint or new poster will, generally say so somewhere in the listing, even if the print is tiny.

With something like this, expressly described as ‘vintage’ and ‘original’ in the listing, if it didn’t turn out to be the real deal, and you’d paid by Paypal, I think your case for getting a refund would be pretty watertight.

Which isn’t to say that there aren’t scammers, and that it’s safe to buy anything which looks half-way plausible. Just that if I had the slightest thought this was going to go for under £150, I’d have a go myself, because it smells right enough to me. But it won’t. Anyone for a sweepstake on final value here?

And also, for those on a tighter budget, a poster that I’ve never seen before, but rather like despite myself:

It’s an RAF poster, and I can’t find it anywhere else, other than on eBay here for just 99p as it stands today. Something for every pocket, then.

Market failure?

auctions

At the end of last year, MrCrownfolio and I made some enquiries about selling some posters at Christies. We have done this before, although the combination of something being good enough quality and us wanting to get rid of it doesn’t come round that often. But, as will become apparent, it’s unlikely ever to happen again. Because the (very polite) reply from Christies was that they now had a minimum lot value of £800. Yes, that’s right, £800.

I couldn’t quite get my head round this, because it seemed so unlikely. Would Christies really want to turn away so many of the posters which have filled their recent sales, from railway posters like this,

(£375, Sept 2008)

which is a species of railway poster I rather like, probably because of the type. Or this classic Abram Games

(£375, June 2008)

So I contacted Nicolette Tompkinson, the head of their poster department, who confirmed that this their new policy.

…the general policy here at Christie’s for new consignments is to include posters that have a minimum lot value of £800. Our aim is put together higher quality sales with less lots as we feel that at £800+ we consistently sell a high percentage of lots at a good price.

I still find this both extraordinary, and a great shame. There are now a whole swathe of poster types which now won’t be sold at Christies, from the kitchier post-war railway posters such as this anonymous Clacton poster,

(£275, Sept 2007)

to post-war London Transport posters (and, indeed, a great many pre-war ones as well).

London Transport Bainbridge vintage poster (£250, Sept 2007)

And there are a number of designers – not only Abram Games, but also Royston Cooper,

(£375, June 2008)

and of course Tom Eckersley

(£264, Sept 2006)

who just won’t appear in their sales any more.

Now, you may be wondering, does this really matter? After all, there are other auctions where these posters can be bought and sold (if I were Patrick Bogue, say, I would be rubbing my hands with glee right now). But I think it does; not just because these are exactly the kind of posters I like and I don’t want to see them left out in the cold, but because I believe it will damage the market in two ways.

One is quite simply that I think fewer posters will now come to market, because they won’t fetch such high prices as they would have done at Christies. Nicolette Tompkinson seemed to suggest that their higher fees were putting off buyers anyway,

In addition, due to a commission rate of 15% and the minimum marketing fee of £40 it is also expensive to sell here at a lower level.

Personally, we’ve never found that too much of a problem. Most of the time the extra fees at Christies are more than cancelled out by a much higher hammer price, so the good posters are – or were – almost always worth putting into their sales rather than somewhere else, despite the costs involved.

But I think the Christies decision will do more than just depress the market financially. There is a sense in which a large auction house operating in this area acts to underwrite the market – these posters are perceived as being both more valuable and more collectable because they are sold at prestige auctions. Without those auctions happening – and without those visibly high prices – post-war graphics and posters are going to struggle for a while. It’s rather like buying a house in an ‘up-coming’ area; fine during the boom, but rather harder to sell in a recession.

But not all of this is Christies’ fault; to some degree they are just reflecting what is happening anyway. Going through their catalogues has made me realise just how much prices have dropped from the peak of a few years ago. Take this rather wonderful Hass poster,

That sold for £1,500 in September 2007, but just £375 two years later. And the cheaper one was in better condition too.

Plus it’s not even all doom and gloom for us either. As collectors, we could now afford things that would have been out of reach before (that Hass poster, for example). It’s just that the posters under the bed may not be our pension fund for a while yet.

One final note of cheer. Here’s an Eckersley for sale in a posh auction – Bloomsbury Auctions on 25th March. From the description, I’m pretty sure it is this,

from 1976, estimated at £100-£150. So life could be worse really.

Britain Can Make Lovely Posters

archives, Uncategorized

A further digression here. I’ve spent the morning assembling the first draft of the links page, and in the course of it have rediscovered this wonderful photograph:

It’s the General Printing part of the 1947 Britain Can Make It exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum. The aim was to showcase the consumer goods which would lead the country’s manufacturing recovery after the war. Although the show was wildly popular, it was generally known as ‘Britain Can’t Have It’ as the country was still under heavy rationing, and almost all the goods on display were designed for export.

At least the posters above would have been an exception to this. I can identify a Games, the Lewitt-Him Vegetabull (below, any excuse) and a Fougasse. The caption also tells me that the front poster about Milk is a James Fitton. If you can identify any others, I’d love to know.

The image comes from the VADS archive, which is a collection of more images and resources than one person can reasonably use in a lifetime. They’ve got a good (if slightly over design-historical) introduction to Britain Can Make It if you’re interested in learning more. I’d just like to have a wander round the exhibition really. And then take the posters home, of course.

Modernism to go

eBay

Right now, you can pick up the bargain of the year so far on eBay. It’s this:

and this

and also this

In fact it’s five posters designed by Wim Crouwel for the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in the 1960s, and as I write, they are currently going for under £10 for the lot. Which is madness. They’d be a bargain just for five anonymous pieces of good design, but for five pieces of Wim Crouwel’s work, it’s a crime.

We simply don’t have designers like Crouwel here in the UK. This isn’t only because we didn’t do this kind of formal, grid-based, type centred modernism. (To get a sense of how mainstream it was in Holland, just imagine the British Museum or the V&A commissioning a poster like this in the 60s, and then go and have a lie down to clear the resulting headache.)

It’s also because, for some reason, very few designers in this country have achieved the ubiquity managed by Crouwel.

“It was actually quite difficult to avoid Wim Crouwel’s work. In the 1960s the Netherlands was inundated with posters, catalogues, stamps designed by him, even the telephone book.”
– Karel Martens

Who can match this? Abram Games did design the Festival of Britain symbol, it’s true, but he hardly styled the entire 50s. Perhaps Hans Schleger is the only one who can come close* – with his work for Libertys and MacFisheries (of which more later), the John Lewis logo and even the London Transport bus stop roundel to his name, it would have been easy to live, travel and shop in a Schleger-shaped world. But did many people ever notice they were doing this? I rather doubt it.

Anyway, this is a bit of a distraction from the business in hand, which is that there are five brilliant pieces of design for sale for not very much money at all so far. Proof that eBay can still come up with the goods sometimes.

*I am disregarding Pentagram as I find most of their designs a bit safe and dull. Perhaps I was living a visual life shaped by Pentagram in the 1970s and 80s, but if I was I didn’t care much either way. But if you think I am in need of correction on this – or you’ve got a better example – please do say.