London Underground Poster Archives - Page 13 of 19

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.

Animals on Parade

designers

Woof.

He’s a fine fellow for a Monday morning, isn’t he. I only wish I felt so well-groomed myself.

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that he’s by Tom Eckersley, and he comes from this:

The book was published in 1947 and is filled with really wonderful illustrations.

So much so that the pictures can really do most of the talking here. They have to in the book as well, because the text really is infernally dull.

There’s a mix of full-page illustrations like the ones above, with smaller insets as well. So penguins are available singly or in fives.

There are also a couple of very pleasing layouts too.

Although the book is post-war, the style very much reminds me of the air-brushed Eckersley/Lombers London Transport posters from the late thirties

Although these rather lovely fish could almost have come from an Eric Ravilious plate.

What’s also pleasing is that I’m not pointing you at something which is jaw-achingly expensive, although you do have the option of buying it from Sotherans for £138 if you like the pain. But it’s on Abebooks for between £15 and £20, which makes a pleasant change.

And if the dust jacket is missing, it’s not quite the crying shame it might be for some books. Because the board covers also feature this lovely cat.

Who might almost have come from this book. I wonder if the Eckersleys kept cats themselves?

Ahead of his time

designers

This may be the only blog post I ever write in praise of estate agents, particularly as we’re thinking of selling our house and so will be dealing with them on a regular basis. But here goes.

We had one round today for a look, and he was clearly a very nice man because he spent as much time staring at the posters on the walls as at the house itself.

He was also very perceptive. After a long hard look at this Henrion, he pointed out that it really was pop art before its time.

Or at least completely of its time. The LT poster is from 1956. Which is exactly the same year as Richard Hamilton’s iconic collage, Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? (I use iconic here in the technical sense, meaning over-represented and over-cited to the point of tiredness, if not actually cliche).

Yes, there are other things going on with the Henrion too. Its angles and sense of speed owe a lot to Rodchenko et al, while its raiding and reworking of Victorian imagery was part of a wider trend in the fifties. But it’s still as genuinely weird as the Hamilton, if not stranger.

Adrian Shaughnessy writes of Henrion, much later on, that

despite his work with government departments and giant corporations, despite his OBE, and despite his eminence within post-war British design, he retained a radical sensibility.

Which, again, is spot on. The whole series of three posters that he produced for London Transport in 1956 are peculiar, not least because theu’re a series which don’t match. Every time I see this poster, I am convinced that it was designed in about 1972, if not later.

Here are a couple more strange ones from his earlier wartime work.

And a reminder that he could also do cute.

All of which means that Henrion deserves rather more credit than he ever gets. He designed the British Leyland logo too,

And, while we’re here, let’s have a cheer for visually literate estate agents too. Let’s hope he can sell houses as well.

Friday Miscellany

eBay

Odds and ends from the internet today. Mostly because I wanted to post this.

Normally it lives on the shelf in Richard Hogg‘s studio. Lucky him.

You can buy some later Eckersley on eBay at the moment too.

We’ve got a copy of that already. But I can say with some certainty that it didn’t cost £100, which is its starting price.

There on the other hand, people seem to have come back to eBay after the summer holiday lull with high expectations of what their posters are worth.

Both this Unger

and this William Fenton reproduction (previously mentioned in despatches here)

are up with a starting price of £44.99.

But perhaps the seller isn’t deluded. Because this delightful John Burningham – also a reproduction – has just sold for £56.01.

The John Burningham book has arrived, by the way, and is an utter delight. So more on him next week. For now, a look at the proper version of the poster above to cheer you up on a dull Friday morning.

Perhaps I might even go on a country walk myself this weekend.

Two for the shelves

eBay

Look what’s turned up on eBay.

Poster Design by Tom Eckersley. Currently a complete steal at £6, but I suspect it will go higher, as the going rate on Abebooks is running close to £50.

But mostly pleasing because it allows me to post this again.

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Who knew colour separation could be such fun.

While we’re thinking about books on eBay, you could also also pick up “the definitive book on London Transport posters“. Perhaps.

But you only get to see the book way down their listing; they’re advertising it via this rather lovely bit of Bawden.

It comes from this 1936 poster for Kew Gardens.

This is currently at 99p (the book, not the poster), but again I’m sure that won’t last. Watch and wait.

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.