The Price of Everything
Today, a miscellany of stuff, mostly for sale. And it’s a mixed bag of good, bad and ugly. Shall we start with the latter?
This, um, rarely seen poster is being sold by an American auction house in an internet auction on Sunday. Although I tell you this more as a warning than an invitation to buy.
Truly, proof that the golden age of the railway poster was dead and buried by 1978. Amazingly there is a bid on it too.
To cleanse your eyes after that, some lovely Daphne Padden. Travel On Paper are selling this classic for what looks to me like a very reasonable dealer price of £275.
Now I’m not sure what Daphne Padden is actually worth these days (and I know that I’m saying this from the persepective of someone who’s got quite a few of her posters, and am therefore not exactly an unbiased observer, but hey). On one hand, other dealers are selling less good posters by Daphne Padden for £450+; on the other, we got our copy of the poster above at Morphets, last year, for just £65 and something else came with it, even if I can’t remember what. So, what’s the actual value? I haven’t got a clue. Anyway, Travel on Paper are at MidCentury Modern in Dulwich on Sunday 20th if you want to look at some of their posters or just say hello.
Over on eBay it’s the same story, posters of varying quality at seemingly random prices. Shall we start with cheap, but rightfully so.
It’s a National Savings Bank Poster, but I can’t tell you any more than is on the listing I’m afraid.
While this railway poster, with a similar womens’ magazine styling to its illustration, has a starting bid of $210.
But it is being sold by a dealer, PosterConnection, so perhaps the price isn’t so surprising.
Meeting them somewhere in the middle is this H M Bateman Save Fuel poster which seems very reasonable at £48 Buy It Now, especially considering it’s 20″ x 30″.
The more I think about that, the more I think it is a bargain; the better known examples of these can go for £200 or more at auction. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
The seller also has this ATS poster, from a series which has been mentioned on here before, and I believe is by Beverley Pick.
This is currently on a £68 Buy It Now, which is rather more like what it would fetch at auction, but still not unreasonable.
Finally in this heap of odds and ends, a couple of follow-ups to previous posts. When I wrote about John Burningham the other day, I couldn’t find an image of his cats in a boat coach poster that I’d liked so much at the exhibition. But Liz Dobson very kindly sent me a photo.
I’ll add it to the post as well, but I thought I’d show you here too as it’s so great. And if you do happen to have a spare one…
And following on from my musings about airline posters, Martin Steenson of Books & Things pointed me at this Lewitt-Him AOA poster, which he currently has for sale.
While it doesn’t have the expansive blue skies or vapour trails of their other posters, I still think this has a strong connection to the visual language of the war in the air. Because it looks to me like nothing so much as a wartime aircraft recognition poster.
Were there other areas where the visual memory of the war spilled out of the national subconscious and into peace time like this? Surely there must have been: the war was too all-encompassing to be easily forgotten, however hard people wanted to try.