Profit Margin

Following on from the comments on my last piece about the inexplicable gap between eBay prices and elsewhere, a couple of instructive compare and contrasts for you.

Firstly, this excellent piece of sixties-iana, about which I know nothing except the rather obvious fact that it is for Pan Am.

vintage 1960s Pan Am poster womans face

Oh, and that its current asking price is $3,250.  If you’re tempted, it’s in an online exhibition of travel posters held by the International Vintage Poster Dealers Association.  I am not, you will be unsurprised to learn, a member.

However, if you are more of a fan of the poster than the price, then you can rue your missed opportunity, because it did turn up on eBay at the end of last year, where it fetched just $384.99.

Example two we have seen only the other day, as it’s Victor Pasmore’s exhibition poster which is up at Christies next month.

Victor Pasmore (1908-1998) LONDON GROUP lithograph in colours, 1948

This too came up on eBay only about six weeks ago, when it went for just £125.  In case you need reminding, the Christies estimate is £600-800.

Now I know that price can depend on condition, but even so the discrepancies are huge.  And given that both these posters are fairly rare (I have never ever seen either of them before now), the odds must be quite good that it’s the same poster being sold on.

One more example, although in this case the price discrepancy is partly explained by the fact that the original listing is in German.  Tom Eckersley’s book on Poster Design, the source of this wonderful illustration.

Tom Eckersley colour separations

Now the last time this went past on eBay, the asking price £75, give or take a penny.  But the lucky purchaser in the German auction got it for just one euro.  And you can’t really blame that on the whole thing being written in foreign, because it did say ‘Tom Eckersley’ very clearly in the title.

So, eBay: an enigma and a mystery.  And probably also quite a good business model if you’re interested in buying cheap and selling expensive.  Any economists out there with any more interpretations?

While we’re on the subject of Tom Eckersley, another way round high auction prices is available.  The V&A are selling reproductions of his Keep Britain Tidy Poster as part of the merchandising for their Modern British Design show.

Tom Eckersley Keep Britain Tidy poster V&A

Which I suppose may mean that there is an Eckersley poster in there somewhere, along with everything else.  I really ought to go and see that and we are going to London in a few weeks time.  But given that we are already planning to subject small Crownfolio to the Jeremy Deller exhibition, the V&A might be a step too far for one day.  Perhap we’ll go and see the dinosaurs instead.

Quite a Lot

Incoming at Crownfolio Towers has been the story this week.

Three times in the last couple of weeks a job lot of posters has come up on eBay and, as no one else seemed to want them very much, three times they’ve ended up as ours.  Net result, more posters than one household strictly needs (35 in total, if you must ask).

So we are now the go-to people for vintage dental hygiene,

Vintage 1950s dental hygiene poster Ministry of Health CoI HMSO

food hygiene posters

Vintage Food Hygiene posters Ministry of Health CoI

and 1960s road safety messages.

Dixon of Dock Green RoSPA cycling proficiency poster

Lucky old us.

Now, these kinds of lots are interesting for a whole heap of reasons, many of which I’ve gone over on here before.  They’re a window into sets of posters which might otherwise have disappeared entirely.  I can’t imagine there are too many collectors of posters about dustbin hygiene management, to start with.

Ministry of Health vintage 1950s dustbin hygiene poster CoI

Or supersized flies.

Guard food against flies vintage CoI Ministry of Health poster

Lots are also interesting because they tend to preserve bad posters along with the good, and quite a few of the posters we have bought are, if I’m honest, second-rate.  But then, if we’re just writing about what’s graphically appealing, is that a proper reflection of what really happened? To start with, we’re writing a story that’s going to change every time tastes alter.  Although some posters might never make it back into fashion.

Rabbit Teeth Matter vintage tooth care poster

If they were ever there in the first place.

What’s more, there’s quite often something to be learned from seeing a group of posters together, even if it’s just the taste of the person who collected them at the time.  These lots offer an insight into some of the less glamourous jobs the CoI were doing in the 1950s and 1960s.

CoI ministry of health vintage food hygiene poster

While the RoSPA posters do give a real sense of an entire campaign, probably at about the same sort of time.

Vintage ROSpa road safety poster 1960s

Vintage RoSPA road safety poster 1960s

Vintage RoSPA road safety poster 1960s

All of which is the intellectual justification, but an even bigger reason for buying job lots like these is the hope, never far from the mind of the collector, that lurking in the pile might be a hidden gem.  And we did get lucky this time; the dental health set included this Reginald Mount which I’ve never seen before.

REginald Mount tooth care poster for ministry of Health CoI 1950s

Which considering that the entire set only cost us 55p, really has to be a bargain.

I also quite like this RoSPA poster, even if it is a bit battered.

Vintage RoSPA road safety poster 1950s

But for us, lots have a particular compulsion.  This is because, once upon a few years ago, we bought a huge lot of posters from eBay, based only on a single shot of a pile of posters spread on someone’s floor. Admittedly that pile did seem to contain a Guinnes poster, two 1950s London Transport posters and quite a bit more, so we bet quite a lot of money on it, having both promised each other that there would be no recriminations if it turned out that we had spent a lot of money on a pile of rubbish.

Fortunately, it was worth every penny. Below are just a couple of the unexpected joys that came out of the package when it finally arrived.

Macfish of lovelyness by zero

Sheila Robinson poster as part of heap

There were plenty more too – most of the classics in our collection came from that one single purchase.

We’ll probably never get anything like that again. But even so, it’s still almost impossible to pass on a lot of posters when we see one, just in case.

RIP COI

So the Central Office of Information is to be no more (news here in the Guardian).  This is a sad end because once upon a time they produced some rather wonderful posters.  Here’s a handy thought from them for this time of the year.

COI remember your passport when travelling abroad Reginald Mount Eileen Evans vintage poster

Coincidentally, I reccently bought a history of the COI from Abebooks.  (I don’t suggest you do the same: this would be the driest book I have come across for some time, had it not been beaten by History of The Second Word War: Food Volume 2 – Studies in Administration and Control which currently sits on my desk, waiting to bore me out of my wits.)  The real problem, at least as far as I am concerned, is that the book  doesn’t mention posters much.  Here’s pretty much the most interesting – or at least relevant – paragraph in the whole thing.

Over this entire period [i.e. since 1946] the COI has also had the part-time services of Reginald Mount and Eileen Evans as consultants and designers of a long succession of award winning posters, most notably for health education.

Posters like this.

Mount Evans hand palmistry stop smoking vintage poster central office of information

Which does at least answer the question I raised a few weeks back, which was when did Mount/Evans leave the COI and set up on their own?  Although the answer does seem to be a kind of Schroedinger-esque uncertainty principle in which they both left in 1946 when the COI was founded and at the same time never left.  I suppose that as long as we never look in the Ministry box, it will be fine.

What does seem to be true is that the vast majority of the COI posters I have come across seem to be by either Mount/Evans or Reginald Mount on his own.  My very slightly anal database tells me that we have had 28 COI posters at various times, but with very few other artists represented.  One is Thelwell, who produced a whole series of Countryside Code cartoons.

Thelwell Countryside code poster Central Office of Information

While the other is the magnificent Royston Cooper.

Brian the Lion Royston Cooper vintage poster Keep Britain Tidy Central Officec of Information

I also suspect that this Henrion may also be a COI production, but can’t prove it.

FHK Henrion vintage poster Keep Britain Tidy exhibtiion

But that’s almost it.  Which is surprising, because the COI book has a list of designers who worked for them, and it reads like a who’s who of graphic design in the 1950s and 60s.

For posters and book illustrations in the department’s lifetime these have included Rowland Hilder, Milner Grey, John Minton, Topolski, Ardizzone, Abram Games, Ashley Havinden, F H K Henrion, Hans Unger, Eckersley, Laurence Scarfe, James Fitton, Ronald Searle, Edward Bawden, Andre Amstutz, Tunnicliffe and the Crosby/Fletcher/Forbes group.

Now, I can see that our collection is a bit skewed, simply because we bought a lot of Mount/Evans posters at auction a few years ago when what I suspect was their studio archive was being sold off.  But even then, whenever we’ve seen and bought other COI posters they’ve been by them too – like this Keep Britain Tidy design by Reginald Mount.

Keep Britain Tidy vintage poster Reginald Mount for COI

A search of auction houses and archives like VADS reveals pretty much the same pattern – much Mount/Evans and Mount, very little else from the COI.

One reason for this may lie in the history of the COI itself.  The Central Office of Information was formed in 1946 as a replacement for the Ministry of Information, which had produced most of the government’s publicity and propaganda requirements during the war.  But for many people, propaganda of any time was seen as fundamentally not British and unsuited to a democratic state – i.e. this was something that the Nazis did and therefore, by definition, we shouldn’t.  It could only be justified by the needs of war, and so the Ministry had to go at the end of hostilities.

The problem with this was that the war itself didn’t finish so neatly.  Austerity and rationing continued right into the early 1950s, and indeed was stricter in the late 1940s than it had been during the war.  This in turn meant that much of the wartime instruction and exhortation to work hard and make a nutritious meal out of little more than cabbage had to carry on too.  So when the Central Office of Information was founded, it had quite a lot of work on its hands, and I suspect that many of those artists worked for the COI in those early years.

However it’s very hard to tell which these are; my suspicions are that most get lumped in under the heading of ‘World War Two’ posters.  For example, I’ve seen both of these posters, by Lewitt-Him and James Fitton respectively, dated to 1947 rather than during the war itself.

Lewitt Him Vegetabull vintage poster Ministry of Food

Turn Over A New Leaf vintage poster James Fitton Ministry of Food

Neither of these would have been produced by the COI, since the Ministry of Food ran its own posters and publicity throughout the war and I can’t imagine changed that afterwards, but they are good examples of how the wartime messages carried on past 1945.  The only COI poster I know of which is definitely from this period is by Dorrit Dekk.

Dorrit Dekk bones still needed for salvage vintage poster Central Office of Information

Dorrit Dekk only started producing posters in 1946, when she was demobbed from the WRNS and went to work for Reginald Mount at the COI, so this must be from between then and 1948 when she left.  But without knowing this biography, it would be impossible to date the poster and it too would probably be ascribed to the war years as well.  So I imagine that vast swathes of the COI’s early output has either disappeared, or been labelled as ‘wartime posters’ and, unless someone puts in a formidable piece of archival research one day, will never be known.  I also suspect that those were the posters designed by that great list of artists in the book.

As the years went on, the need for government publicity decreased – although this anonymous COI poster is reminiscent of wartime appeals.

Civil Defense COI vintage poster

Judging by her hairdo, I’d put this at quite soon after the war anyway, but I’d be interested to hear if anyone else knows more.

By the late 1950s or early 1960s though, the government just didn’t have as much to say.  Get a passport on time, don’t drop litter, smoke a bit less.  Don’t drink and drive.  And remember to tell the milkman when you go on holiday.

Mount Evans stop the milkman when you're off on holiday vintage poster

It doesn’t have quite the same heady excitement as the war years.  Although the designers were allowed out for a few digressions, such as United Nations Day.

Mount Evans United Nations Day poster 1967

Not every COI poster was aimed at the general public either; Mount/Evans also produced a number of internal campaigns for the government, most notable ‘Keep Our Secrets Secret’ which I’ve mentioned before on here but which are so excellent that I can’t resist posting one more time.

Mount Evans vintage combination  number poster COI

What Every Girl Should Know Mount Evans secrecy poster Central Office of Information

The other reason why there were fewer posters, of course, is that they were no longer the biggest game in town.  More and more, the COI’s main campaigns were conducted through short films, whether in the cinema or in public information slots on the television.  (Should you be interested, the National Archives have put tons of these online for your amusement).  Only the less important messages like UN Day or internal communications would have been put out by posters alone.

But all of this has now gone, and every government message will just be put out by advertising agencies and be indistinguishable from commercial campaigns.  Perhaps one day someone will produce an illustrated and possibly even interesting history of the COI, to show us just what design classics they did produce in their heyday.

When did you last see an auction?

So, spring is in the air and the auctions are springing up like dandelions on  the lawn.  Christies is tomorrow, as mentioned before, and in the meantime two more catalogues have popped up on the web, Onslows and Van Sabben, with auctions on the 18th May and 4th June respectively.

I’ll start with Onslows first, because it is a great soup of an auction and I don’t quite know what to think of it.  All of the usual subjects – cruises, railways, travel posters – are represented as you’d expect, but with very few jumping out at me demanding to be either bought or written about.  I quite like this Lander, partly because if the Isle of Man is in any way continental, I am an otter.

Eric Lander Isle of Man Vintage British Railways poster 1960
Eric Lander, 1960, est. £500-700

Our non-existent friend Ralph Mott is also represented with several posters, this being my favourite, mainly for the slower-moving world which it evokes.

Ralph Mott country railway lorry services vintage railway poster
Ralph Mott, n.d., est. £150-200

There are also pages – and I mean pages – of wartime propaganda posters from both world wars.  Unfortunately, most of them are visual proof of the fact that most wartime posters were not masterpieces of design.  And I can’t even find a single one which I really love, this is about as good as they get.

Save Bread and you save lives vintage WW2 propaganda poser
Anonymous, est. £100-150

But not all is doom and gloom if you wander through the catalogue.  This Rex Whistler is battered, but still lovely through the creasing and tape.

Rex Whistler vintage shell poster Aylesbury 1930
Rex Whistler, 1930, est. £300-400.

Even better (if you’re me, at least) are a selection of post-war London Transport posters.  Probably the most noteworthy is this Bawden.

Edward Bawden vintage London transport poster 1936
Edward Bawden, 1936, est. £300-400

But there are other treasures too.

Abram Games, London, vintage London Transport poster, 1964
Abram Games, 1964, est. £200-300

Enid Marx Science Museum vintage London Transport poster 1964
Enid Marx, 1964, est. £150-200

Peter Robeson, Velasquez, vintage London Transport poster 1956
Peter Robeson, 1956, est. £100-150.

I’ve always loved that last Robeson poster.  Although it’s called ‘When did you last see your Velasquez?’ it’s much more about being contemporary than art historical; in fact it’s like the essence of the mid-1950s distilled onto a single poster.  All of which means that, in my book at least, it’s a bit of a bargain at that estimate.  But I’m likely to be wrong on that one.

There’s quite a lot of overlap between Onslows and Van Sabben too.  Obviously they’ve both got a lot of foreign posters of various sorts, some of which are rather good.

Colin Air France India vintage poster 1963
Jean Colin, 1963, est. £250-300

Onslows vintage Swedish exhibition poster
Anonymous, est. £150-200

These are both from Onslows, but as you can imagine, Van Sabben has literally hundreds more.


Max Velthuys, est. €80

More surprising is the other thing they have in common, which is a selection of large format GPO posters by interesting artists.  These two are in the Onslows sale:

Hans Schleger vintage GPO poster 1942
Hans Schleger, 1942, est. £200-300

Manfred Reiss, vintage GPO Poster, exports, 1948
Manfred Reiss, 1948, ext. £200-250

While these three are from Van Sabben.

Beaumount vintage GPO poster WW2
Beaumont, 1960 (?), est. €160

Rothholz, vintage GPO poster, 1948
Rothholz, 1948, est. €280

Reiss vintage GPO poster 1950
Reiss, 1950, est €150

If only I were a GPO museum, then I’d go on a spending spree, as they’re probably my favourite things on offer.  But there are a couple of other interesting items in Van Sabben too, like this pair of Reginald Mount posters.

Reginald Mount vintage waste paper salvage poster 1950
Reginald Mount, 1950, est. €150

REginald Mount vintage housewife salvage poster 1950
Reginald Mount, 1950, est. €180

The design of the latter one is almost good enough for me to overlook the fact that I am being addressed as Housewife again.  I’m not sure if Mrs Housewife is better or worse.

Other than that, it’s the usual suspects here: a few war posters, a couple of railway posters, and, of course, a BOAC poster.

Abram Games vintage BOAC poster 1953
Abram Games, 1953, est. £500

I think they’re compulsory these days.

But for a small selection of posters (perhaps only 30 out of over a thousand) Van Sabben have managed to pull a few interesting ones out of the hat once again.  Still don’t know if I’m actually going to buy anything though…

Lucky Dip

As promised last week, it’s random image day – a whole heap of posters that I have discovered along the way but not managed to use in a post.  All sizes, all shapes, every one a great piece of design.

Here’s a Mount/Evans for starters – it’s from the V&A collection and I’ve never seen it anywhere else.

Mount Evans Keep Our Secrets Secret fish vintage poster COI

It comes from their prints website (that is prints that they sell you, rather than the Prints and Drawings Department), which tells me it comes from 1960.  One day I will rant about the impossibility of getting any kind of fix on what the V&A actually holds, but even describing what it does and doesn’t do is such a daunting task that it may take me a while.

This Reginald Mount (the third of a set which were up on eBay a while back) also comes from there.

Reginald Mount Keep Britain Tidy poster park keeper

And I can’t tell you a single thing about this (which, again, I’ve never seen before) because their system is so byzantine and strange that I now can’t find it again.  But, is good.

Don't keep a diary vintage ww2 poster

Not only Reginald Mount, but Hans Unger would also like you to Keep Britain Tidy, although he is rather more anguished about it.

Hans Unger Keep Britain Tidy 1964 COI vintage poster

And yes, that is a photograph of a poster pinned to a piece of hessian.  You’ve got to love the Design Council Slide Collection.  As well as the seventies.

They also produced this pair of Eckersleys, which are a bit different to most of his work.

Tom Eckersley Weekend Living poster

Tom Eckersley holiday haunts brochure

Not sure about the dates for these, the Design Council puts the first one at 1980, but it looks earlier than that, about the same period as the brochure cover.  I’m also taking their dating with a pinch of salt, as they estimate the second one to be c1959-65 – despite the large black 1961 in the top right corner.

Meanwhile, back at the GPO, there are some very strange posters.  This one, by Beaumont, for example.

Beaumount a smile in your voice vintage GPO poster

Apparently this is from 1957, although it looks earlier to me.  He was clearly saner in 1950 when he did this for them.

Beaumont cable vintage poster GPO

And finally, a random bit of early 60s kitch.  They must have really loved that diving board at Weston Super Mare, I’ve seen it on so many posters.

Weston Super Mare vintage British Railways poster

Good, now I can tidy them all away.  Only to start laying down some more, of course.

Guardian writer bien informée

I’ve been overtaken by events over the last few days, which has eaten into my thinking and posting time more than I would have liked.  Fortunately, Sam Leith in today’s Guardian has been writing intelligently about posters, so that I don’t have to.  His points about the decline of lithography and the absence of concept apply to more than just political posters.

He’s using the newly revamped and re-opened People’s History Museum in Manchester for the posters which prove his point.  They do have an excellent digitised archive too, so you can wander through their collections and draw your own conclusions.  The images, however, are still a bit ropey.  Here’s one poster I liked, a touch green perhaps.

vintage green potato harvest poster

But the other Civil Defence one above actually comes from our own collection, as their image from the same series was more of a collection of pixels than anything else.  But I’m sure that’s just teething problems.

(And yes, I know, our images aren’t that great either.  We only took them as mug shots for our own reference, not having any idea that they might end up out there on the web.  So apologies if a) they are less than orthogonal, and b) you see more of our floor that you might strictly wish to.)

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the web, you can buy  this:

femme bien informee london transport poster

Possibly the only time you are going to see the words Harry Stevens and Art in the same sentence.  There on the other hand, it is only £9.99 at the moment.  On eBay of course.