bus posters Archives - Page 4 of 5

Sold and unsold

eBay

Right, it’s eBay Watch time once more. I do this so often that I feel as though it should have its own logo. I shall work on that when I get a moment.

Your starter for ten is that this, surprisingly, didn’t sell.

There isn’t enough Barnett Freedman in the world, so I would have thought that this would have gone, even with a few flaws and an asking price of £100. Shows how little I know.

But this did sell, for £23.22.

Interestingly, although it’s a Studio Seven classic coach poster, I’m not sure that it came from Morphets, perhaps the sale has brought a few more out of the woodwork. (We didn’t buy it, incidentally; there’s the small question of what we do with the thirty-odd coach posters that we already have to sort out first…)

I don’t remember either of these from the sale either, so perhaps there is now going to be a boom in coach posters (or a mass unloading, depending on your point of view).

The top one is by Atkins, the bottom by Bigg, but they’re on for £75 and £1oo respectively (although, I have to say, I much prefer the cheaper one, if only for the White Horse on it).

But these ones might have come from the sale. Perhaps. Either that or Patlid is a seller who has found a rather good cache of unused posters.

I can of course wish that this fabulous Bromfield would go for the £9.99 that it is currently listed at, but rather doubt that it will.

Meanwhile over on the other side of the Atlantic, MaxReinhold is selling even more Zero London Underground posters from the war.

He’s had so many of these now that I can’t really get excited about them any more, although I would be interested to know where they came from. Perhaps I’ll ask.

Finally, a couple of sixties gems. This LT poster from 1964 is by Laurence Scarfe and is really rather nice.

Although whether I would actually want those mad staring eyes framed and on the wall of my house is another question. So it might not be the £90 of nice that they are asking for.

And then, from just a few years later, there’s this Alan Aldridge poster for a 1968 event at the Royal Festival Hall. With The Grateful Dead and John Peel, natch. It’s already been on Retro to Go, but I thought I’d tell you anyway.

Besides, if you want one, you can almost certainly have one, because the seller seems to have found a whole stock of unused copies. There are more than ten left, and getting one will set you back just £30.

There is more out there too – mainly a whole slew of railway posters – but those will have to wait until next week. Or maybe tomorrow.

Auction thoughts

auctions

Once the dust had settled, I had hoped to come up with some conclusions about the Morphets bus and train extravaganza of last week. But the more I look at the results, the more my brain becomes addled. This isn’t just the result of the scale of it all, although that hasn’t got any better, it’s also because I’m not entirely sure there are that many conclusions to be drawn.

So let’s start with some simple thoughts. Expensive posters sold for lots of money.

This went for £2400, which is pretty much what I’ve seen it go for every time.

People still like to buy pictures of trains. It seems that they also like to buy pictures of motorbikes too.

Any other reason for that fetching £300 rather escapes me.

People like pictures which look like real things in general. So this Riley fetched £500,

while the Amstutz of the same subject only went for £240. (Apparently it is possible to go and stay on restored camping coaches even today. I must investigate further.)

Most of all though, what people like to buy most of all are nice pictures of landscapes which look a bit like proper art. So posters like these,

are highly desirable and go for £600 and £750 respectively.

This rule seems to work for bus posters too – this Lander reached a very respectable £340.

Although even I can see the appeal of that one.

But as I mentioned before, things which looked less like fields and more like design didn’t do so well. The Paddens, Coopers and their like didn’t reach anything like the prices I expected. There were a few exceptions to this which are worth taking a look at.

Firstly, kitschy 50s graphics seemed to be selling well – this Bromfield fetched £440.

While at a lower level, this rather nice Studio Seven pair fetched £70, more than most coach posters were managing to do.

Even more odd was that, in a complete reversal of the normal situation, artworks fetched more than the original posters. Royston Cooper’s airport artwork went for £320,

when you could have picked up the poster, as one of a pair, for £38.

While this Daphne Padden ark-work sold for £240, more than any of her individual posters made. Go figure.

But there was one big exception to the rule that good design didn’t sell – although perhaps not quite so much of an exception considering that it is a picture of a field as well.

Tom Eckersley’s Lincolnshire reached £550. Two readers of this blog battled with us over it – we lost but it’s going to a good home over in Norfolk so I don’t mind. Not too much anyway.

Bits, bobs, and Bawden

eBay

Although I’ve been mildly obsessed with what’s been happening in Harrogate, life has in fact been going on elsewhere.

This rather wonderful Abram Games poster went past on eBay on Monday, for a what seems like a fair £231.

I’ve never seen one out in the wild before, and I approve of it.

Meanwhile, if you do have any money left, a few other posters are also coming up in the next week or so should you fancy them.

Probably the most interesting is this London Electricity Board poster. The seller actually has three, but this one by Geoffrey Clarke is my favourite.

The listing says that they’re from the late 1940s, and they seem to be from a collaboration between the LEB and the Royal College of Art. They’re another example of how our history of posters is mostly determined by what survived; these are really interesting attempts to produce posters of cultural worth, just as the GPO or Shell did, but I’ve never come across them before or seen them mentioned. If anyone can shed any more light on them, I’d be really grateful.

Elsewhere, this slightly odd Geraldine Knight poster is from 1972, with an inital asking price of £30.

The original artwork is pictured on the London Transport Museum site, and it’s a great lump of bronze. Which may quite possibly make this poster unique. And I imagine plays havoc with their archiving systems.

Then, in competition for worst eBay picture of the week, there is this Badmin coach design.

The seller is hoping for £99, which isn’t entirely unreasonable given the prices that this kind of thing was fetching at Morphets (I wonder if that’s what flushed it out onto eBay or whether it’s a simple coincidence). But it’s a very high start price, and probably needs a few more photos to do well. As ever, watch this space.

And then there’s this, which isn’t a poster at all but is so delightful that I can’t resist, and has the added bonus of almost certainly not going for £99.

It’s from 1962 by James Mawtus-Judd, about whom I can discover precisely nothing at all. But it’s still lovely

Finally, I’ve been meaning to mention Martin Steenson’s blog for a while. He has the admirable aim of providing a proper overview of the work of well known artists and designers (as opposed to the scattered thoughts and biased opinions on offer over here).

His latest piece is on Edward Bawden, so please do go and take a look.

Poster Mathematics

auctions

I can’t resist a few instant observations about Morphets. The full set of opinions will have to wait until I’ve got the complete results in front of me and some more time, but for the moment, we’ll deal with what I know.

Firstly, it’s clear that not many people like Daphne Padden and Royston Cooper as much as we do.

This is both a good thing and a bad thing. It does mean that we can pick up some lovely posters for rather less than we thought we’d have to pay – the lot above went for just £85. How anyone can not like that right hand poster in particular is beyond me. I particularly love it because the woman looks like all of my aunts in old photographs, but that’s incidental, it’s wonderful anyway.

But it also means that their work still isn’t getting the acclaim and recognition that they both deserve; particularly when kitschy 1950s seaside posters were going for way more. Perhaps it will just take a bit longer for the 1960s to come into fashion properly.

A possible third explanation (which would account for more than just these prices) is that the kind of people who buy 1960s posters don’t tend to hang around at railway and coach sales in Harrogate. Which is their loss. The left hand one above, incidentally, is an Eckersley which I have never seen before. Has anyone else spotted it elsewhere?

Although more likely is that there just isn’t a developed enough market in coach posters for people to be competing over them. Because 1960s London Underground posters did do well, with most of them hitting £80 – £100+, like this delectable John Burningham.

All of which adds up to the fact that I don’t really have a definite answer on Padden and Cooper values; if you have any thoughts, I’d love to hear them.

My other main observation is that auctions and their prices operate outside the world of logic, and I shall illustrate this with a small amount of mathematics.

This pair of posters went for £80.

If we say that the poster on the left is worth no more than £20, that values our sailor at £60. So far so good.

This pair then went for £260.

Which makes our friends with the cat worth £200-ish.

Except that, just a few lots later, this went for just £65.

Despite the fact that this version is in better condition. Unless the very subtle differences in the typography matter to people, this makes no sense at all. But I can’t think about it any more because it’s making my head ache.

More thoughts on Morphets later on this week, something completely different tomorrow.

Further Coaching

designers

It’s the last stage of the giant Daphne Padden archive-fest on Quad Royal. Most of the posters I’m putting up today are for coach companies and so have at least been seen before. In fact well over half of these are on sale at Morphets tomorrow, so if you take a fancy to any of them, you can probably have one, although I can’t promise at what price.

I know I should stop making fun of these poor northerners and their low prices, but this one is estimated at £50-100. The rabbits below get the same estimate, and you get another spring poster to boot. If only.

But I haven’t just come here to mutter about Morphets once more, there are a couple of things worth saying about these posters.

One is just what a difference an archive makes. Daphne Padden’s posters are beginning, over the last few years, to surface into the general design consciousness. But I do wonder whether she would have been better known if she’d worked for British Railways or London Transport as well.

Royston Cooper has had a similar, if less dramatic problem. Both he and Padden designed a whole series of really great posters for the coach companies. But because the coach companies both had a more chequered history, and were never really considered as a national asset in the same way anything which ran on rails, the nuts, bolts and printed matter of their past didn’t end up being preserved.

A very brief summary of what happened in the world of coaches is that the many small companies like Royal Blue which served the different parts of the UK, were gradually bought up and amalgamated into larger groups. In 1947 – after a war in which few coaches ran – the whole industry was nationalised, eventually becoming National Express. This was then split up and de-nationalised between 1983 and 1987. And somewhere in all of that, we stopped caring about coaches and, most likely, a whole pile of history was thrown out into a skip.

With the result that we now don’t really know anything about coach posters at all, never mind having an archive or even dates for them. Well, except for a few like the one below.

Which is an enormous shame as there are some wonderful posters made for the coach companies which have almost disappeared into oblivion. And is why I keep banging on about them here, trying to give them some kind of visibility on the web.

My other thought is a bit more positive though, which is that her particular style of design is now becoming interesting (possibly even fashionable) for a wider audience of designers and, possibly, collectors. Take a look at the Fears and Kahn website, which I’ve been meaning to mention for a while. They’ve put together, for selling, a rather distinctive set of posters, some from coach companies, but very much in this particular idiom. I’m hoping that this will be the start of more recognition for designers like Padden and Royston Cooper.

And finally, a few odd notes on some individual items. I am guessing that this is some kind of early artist’s proof for her famous Royal Blue poster.

What’s odd, is that it’s not a print with just one colour missing – the text in the final poster is in the same dark blue as his hat and the lighthouse.

Even odder, is that his smile is missing in the proof too. I’m glad he cheered up.

And finally, I just like these. I think they should be on t-shirts or something.

Do we have any takers for Quad Royal branded goods?

Throw a Coach Party

auctions

It’s here. The much anticipated Morphets everything-you-ever-wanted-to-own-from -the-sixties-and-seventies Malcolm Guest catalogue has arrived at The Saleroom and on their website.

Wales and Coach tours 2 vintage posters from morphets
Donald Smith, two posters for Hants and Dorset Coaches

My brain is going to take a while to absorb it all, especially in this heat – there are over a thousand lots, and with many of them multiples of between two and fifteen posters, I haven’t a clue how many posters are actually for sale. Really quite a lot I should think, and all I’ve been able to do is skim through them. So, for the moment, here are a few nice items chosen at random for your entertainment. And a few first thoughts too.

Bruce Angrave, Party Travel for 8 or more, vintage rail poster morphets sale
Bruce Angrave, Party Travel, British Railways poster

There are huge numbers of posters which I certainly have never come across at auction or illustrated before, from, the whimsical to the modern.

Longman Party Outings By Rail vintage railway poster from Morphets
Longman, Party Outings By Rail, British Railways

John Wright, Rail Rover Tickets, British Railways

And a few which seem to have fallen off the first sale, like this rather lovely bit of GWR modernism.

Ralph Mott Factories and Factory Sites, GWR

There are also a lot of coach posters in addition to the railway collection – well over three hundred.

Studio Seven, Hire a Coach

Karo/Jacques, Luxury Coach Tours; Send Your Parcels by Bus

But mostly it’s the sheer quantity of posters itself that I find overwhelming. I could – and probably will – do a whole post just about the Royston Coopers that they have, most of which I’ve never seen before.

I should also point out that, once again, the estimates are insanely low. That Royston Cooper is estimated at £50-100, as are the two Daphne Paddens below.

If even half the lots go for close to these estimates I will a) eat my hat and b) need a removal van to bring all of my purchases down from Harrogate.

It gets even madder when you start to look at the multiples.

Anyone fancy the Games, Eckersley and two Ungers above for £100 to £150? I do, but I also don’t rate my chances too highly on that.

A full appraisal will follow in due course, but it really is worth going to take a look yourself – and then please do come back and tell me what you think.