Meet Mr Poster
There has definitely been a change in eBay over the last few years, at least in terms of the poster market. When we first started watching it, most of what was up for sale wasn’t either of much quality or of much value. Think National Savings and posters which had been damaged beyond all reasonable repair. And quite often both.
Nowadays, though, it’s very different out there. What’s on offer can sometimes look more like a sample from a specialist poster auction than the scrapings from someone’s attic, although admittedly you don’t get to look at pictures of so many people’s floors in a proper auction.
It’s one of those weeks this week. So you could have a Guinness poster.
Or a high quality film poster by none other than James Fitton.
Although with a starting bid of £250, I shan’t be buying it. As the posters on offer edge up to auction quality, it seems the prices are doing the same. I’m less impressed with that, however inevitable it is.
For a £99.99 opening offer, you might also have this period railway poster, featuring a man with wonderfully spivvy dress sense.
Extra points for standing on the poster while you’re taking the photograph there.
You might also be interested in this gem (starting price £80) which is one of my favourite railways posters that we don’t own. Yet.
I spent several of my teenage years travelling in and out of Manchester Piccadilly for gigs, nightclubs and hanging around in shops without buying anything, so it has a great nostalgic appeal. Although I don’t remember the architecture looking quite that optimistic or even interesting after a couple of decades of unsympathetic adaptation and Mancunian smoke.
If it’s London Transport posters you are after, there is this bus stop poster by Harry Stevens. Again.
This keeps coming up, everywhere from eBay to Sotherans, and has probably been mentioned on here more times than any other single poster. I have no idea why there are quite so many of them about. Were they distributed to every London school child for the Silver Jubilee or something? Or were they just very easy to steal from bus stops? If anyone has a clue, please do share.
But all is not lost, some corners of eBay are just as they ever were. Would you like a 1960s RoSPA poster?
Please say you would. Because I’ve got a whole tube full of these to put up for sale one of these days, although probably with a starting price of less than £9.99.
There’s also still space for the oddities too, like this man in France who is mostly selling a vast array of posters about safety out on the airport apron which is really worth looking at just for curiosity value alone. The collection includes this British Airways safety poster, yours for the grand sum of €2.
My favourite, however, is this Air France one, also €2 if you fancy it.
Finally, there are the things that are more likely to come up in a junk shop or ephemera fair than an auction house, like a large set of BBC Schools leaflets or a Dorrit Dekk menu.
These reassure me. I’m really pleased it isn’t all tidied up and auction-like yet on eBay; life would be much duller if it were, and I wouldn’t know quite how many people had beige carpets. And we’d hardly be able to afford any posters at all ever. So long may it carry on like this.
