Is it really efficient?

On we must go with the endless stream of auctions.  Today it is Onslows, which takes place on Friday.  What can I tell you about it?

Well the first thing that will strike you as you browse through the catalogue is precisely what a tonnage of Shell posters they have – and there are more too, tucked away at the end.

Keith Grant Somerset Shell Educational poster Wiltshire
Keith Grant, est. £100-150

I really must take a look at what these actually sell for, because the higher estimates of £100-150 do always strike me as slightly fanciful, but then a few always manage to reach that.  Certainly,  I don’t see them going as high at other auctions or on eBay.  Watch this space and I will report back.

That would, however, be an utterly reasonable price to pay for these Tristram Hillier items, which have the same estimate.  I’ve written about them before but, frankly, any excuse.

Tristram HIllier Shell guide to fossils educational poster

Tristram Hiller shell guide to minerals educational poster

What I haven’t ever written about properly, however, are the Shell educational posters themselves.  Must do that one of these days.

Meanwhile back at Onslows, the other thing that will strike you about the auction is a job lot of GPO posters, some being sold singly, some as individual lots.

1950 Harry stevens air mail GPO poster
Harry Stevens, 1950, est. £70-100

Sams 1954 minimum 4d letter rate GPO poster
Sams, 1954, est. £60-80

Now I happen to know the story behind these posters, and it’s one to make any archivist’s hair curl.  Back in the early 1980s, the Royal Mail in their Mount Pleasant HQ were having a sort out.  Sensibly, they decided that two copies of each of the posters they had produced should go to an archive – these are the ones which the BPMA have now.  Rather more bogglingly, they put the rest in a skip.  The seller rescued a selection that he liked.  Some were sold at Bloomsbury in March, this is another batch.

1950 Martin Aitchison Your Letterbox is it really efficient ?, GPO poster
Martin Aitcheson, 1950, est. £40-50

Other than that, the other two interesting items are two rather lovely sets of proofs, one by Barnett Friedman and the other by Edward Ardizzone.

Barnett Freedman (1901-1958) Wuthering Heights (16 plates) , Jane Eyre (16 plates) and Anna Karenina (16 plates), proof uncut lithograph sheets for illustrations from Heritage Press NY 1952,
Barnett Friedman, 1952, est. £200-300

Edward Ardizonne (1900-1979) lithograph proof sheets for Sinbad, Fairground Freak Show and WW2 sentry
Edward Ardizzone, est. £30-50.

I like them a lot, but what you’d actually do with them I’m not entirely sure.

Meanwhile the rest of what is on offer is the usual mix of foreign stuff that I am going to ignore, railway and travel posters, and, as ever, a fair selection of World War Two Home Front posters.

This is probably the stand-out railway poster for me.

Frank Newbould (1887-1951) Scarborough, original poster printed for LNER poster by Waterlow c. 1930
Frank Newbould, 1930, est. £700-1,000

Although, as even a cursory flick through this blog would reveal, I am always a sucker for this series.

L A Wilcox (Lesley Arthur 1904-1982) Cornwall Travel by Train, original poster printed for BR(WR) by Jordison 1960 BR poster
L A Wilcox, 1960, est. £600-700

The main event in the travel poster section, at least if you are me, is a stream of these black and white British travel posters.  A couple are quite interestingly early.

Brighton travel poster 1938
Anonymous, 1938, est. £50-70

The vast majority are not.

Walter Scott's Britain Warwick - The Castle, original sepia photographic poster printed for The Travel Association circa 1948 poster
Anonymous, c. 1948, est. £50-70.

While this in no way constitutes a recommendation to buy one, these posters are quite interesting as historical artefacts.  Take a look at the date: it’s just after the war has ended, and Britain is desperate to pay back the war loans.  And one of the ways to do that, is of course American tourist dollars; so these posters wing their way over to the States to try and persuade our American cousins to come over here.  But I often wonder just how well they worked.  Because America is sleek, glossy and most of all technicolour, but Britain is broke.  So our posters come in black and white and are printed on the cheapest, thinnest paper imaginable.

Of course none of this explains why the 1938 poster is equally as shoddy.  Perhaps the British Travel and Tourist Association were just cheapskates, all the time.

The reason I’ve thought about these posters so much is that Mr Crownfolio and I, some years ago, bought a whole roll of these posters from America for about £30.  We tried to sell a couple on eBay but basically got laughed at.  But then, a couple of years later we tried again, and the prices started rising – so much so that one of the last ones went for over £100.  And now they are at Onslows, well I never.

In the war section, meanwhile, this is probably the most classic poster.

Norman Wilson (dates unknown) Dig for Victory, original WW2 poster printed for HMSO by Chromoworks c.1940 propaganda poster
Norman Wilkinson, 1940, est. £300-400.

While this is my favourite.

Coughs & Sneezes Spread Diseases, original WW2 Home Front poster printed for HMSO by Chromoworks circa 1940
Anonymous, 1940, est. £40-50

Just look at the difference in prices, I am clearly in a minority of one on this.

For a change, there aren’t that many London Transport posters in there, but it’s worth persevering through the whole catalogue, because a pair of gems, both by Abram Games, are tucked away at the end.

Abram Games london zoo lovely poster
Abram Games, 1976, est. £100-150

Abram Games (1914-1996) London Transport Conducted Tours, original poster printed by Waterlow 1950 London Transport poster
Abram Games, 1950, est. £400-500.

In fact that poster above is the very last one in the sale.  And probably one of the best.   But it’s an exception, and I am slightly worried by the general lack of good posters like that from the Onslows sale.  Because with Christies having got so expensive, there’s a real need for an auction house selling the stuff that, well, Christies used to – the Games, the Eckersleys and the Royston Coopers to start with, never mind the Daphne Paddens.  But they aren’t appearing here – so where have they gone?  They haven’t entirely migrated to the railwayana auctions, so where have they all gone?  Do any of you know, because I certainly don’t. And I’d like to.

Results

I promised a while back that’s I’d revisit the most recent Great Central Railwayana auction and see what the posters on offer actually went for.  A course of action necessitated by the fact that railwayana auctions never, it seems, publish an estimate of what they think a poster is going to sell for.  This sometimes makes me think that I must be missing out on loads of cheap bargains, passed over by railway enthusiasts who would rather look at pictures of trains, or at a push, landscapes.

Claude Buckle Somerset
Claude Buckle, sold for £300

This was probably true once upon a time, but it definitely isn’t any more.  Posters are expensive wherever you buy them, and railwayana auctions are no exception to this rule.  The only difference seems to be that posters with a railway rather than design interest might fetch more than they would do at a more general sale, which is fair enough.

A Southern Railway quad royal poster. THE FOUR BELLES RING THE SOUTHERN COAST, by Shep
Shep, sold for £1550

But landscapes and seaside scenes aren’t exactly going cheap either, with this example inexplicably (to me at least) at the top of the range.

poster, LITTLEHAMPTON, by Allinson  British railways poster
Allinson, sold for £860.

Also failing to be bargains are the more decorative posters that I like the best.

Bromfield British railway poster swanage
Bromfield, sold for £490

Gregory Brown Ullswater travel poster
F Gregory Brown, sold for £520.

Even kitsch, which only a few years ago wouldn’t have been very valuable, reaches just the same prices as it would at a general auction sale.

Bexhill British Railways poster 1950s
Anon, sold for £300

The news isn’t all bad, as a couple of odd bargains did slip through.  I very much liked this poster and said so when I looked over the auction.  But I was clearly on my own in this.

Burley Dover Southern railway
Burley, sold for £120

While the Wye Valley was also inexplicably unpopular for a pretty landscape.

Wye Valey russell British Railways poster
Russell, sold for £130

But is there anything else we can conclude beyond my initial assessment that a railwayana auction is unlikely to give you a cheap poster?  I’m not sure there is, really.  There is a very small chance that you might get a bargain, particularly if you were buying for quality of design rather than for meticulous reproduction of countryside or trains.  But equally you might not, and there appears to be no way of telling either.  Perhaps the answer is to put a low bid on anything you half-fancy and hope that it works once or twice per sale.  But that does seem a bit of a random way of buying, even to me.

If we look wider, there is another, rather terrifying conclusion to draw as well.  Because that last auction was actually pretty cheap compared to what else has been going on recently.  The most recent GW Railwayana auction was, frankly, boggling in its prices.  Here is just a small selection.

Glencoe Norman Wilkinson LMS LNER poster
Norman Wilkinson, sold for £1,200

London Norman Wilkinson LMS LNER poster
Norman Wilkinson, sold for £3,550

Terence Cuneo Day begins LMS poster
Terence Cuneo, sold for £6,100

To me, that’s all looking, well, expensive; not just beyond Onslows’ prices, but nudging Christies too.

Not everything headed out at that kind of stratospheric level though.  At this particular auction, the kitsch didn’t do quite as well, in particular this delightful poster which I took a shine to at the time.

Geoff Sadler thornton cleveleys poster british railways 1950s
Geoff Sadler, sold for £180

Although nothing went desperately cheap, and the right poster, clearly, could get the money in.

Rhyl British Railways poster leonard 1961
Leonard, sold for £440

Neither of these sales are exceptions, either. If I go back to the last couple of GCR auctions, the pattern is very much the same.

Morecambe anonymous holiday poster family on beach
Anon, sold for £520

Ayr Laurence british railways poster
Laurence, sold for £620

Frank Mason Yorkshrie Coast vintage LNER 1930s railway poster
Frank Mason, sold for £4,100

With just the very occasional bargain to keep my hopes up.

Largs Ayrshire Lander poster British Railways 1950s
Lander, sold for £50

Oh, and this, which I was very disappointed to see going cheap, mainly because we’ve got a copy.  Never mind.

Tom Purvis East Coast baby yellow railway poster

Tom Purvis, sold for £230

I could go on, but it would only pain me.

Perhaps the most striking thing about railwayana auctions, though, is how much they, and the market, have changed.  The magic of the internet allowed me to revisit a GWRA auction from 2004.  It’s a different world.  There are only about ten posters for sale, of which the vast majority went for very little.  £50 could have bought you either of these for example.

'Yorkshire Coast’, BR poster, 1959. Anonymous

buckle-eden-valley

Compare that to their last auction, where there are several dozen posters on offer, some of very high quality, and many fetching extremely high prices.

This is a big change indeed in under ten years, and it’s something that isn’t often acknowledged.  That includes by the auctions themselves, for whom it seems posters are a bit of a sideline compared to the real business of metal name plates and station platform signs.  But these days, the railwayana auctions together must easily turn over as many posters as Onslows and Christies combined.  I shall pay them a bit more respect in future.  We all should.   And perhaps they could return the favour with some estimates.

Northern return

Last year, I wrote about depictions of the industrial North of England in posters, or rather I pointed out their rather conspicuous absence.  At which point I got quite a lot of comments, mostly saying that I was wrong, and pointing me at posters like this.

Norman Wilkinson Sheffield Steelworks LMS poster

Which is, I am forced to admit, is exactly what I was complaining didn’t exist, a railway poster of Northern industry.  There are, as it turns out, a whole series of Norman Wilkinson posters doing the same sort of thing, including the Runcorn design that I included in the original post, and  a few more to boot.

‘Grangemouth Docks’, LMS poster, Norman Wilkinson industrial  'A Midland Coalfield', LMS poster, c 1935.

'Lanarkshire Steel Works', LMS/LNER poster, c 1935.

I have to say that that last one is the best Norman Wilkinson I’ve ever seen, and if anyone wants to send me a copy feel free.

But Wilkinson wasn’t the only artist working in this series – this poster is by Frederick Cayley Robinson.

Frederick Cayley Robinson Cotton poster LMS 1924

Now on the one hand I clearly am wrong, there are quite a few posters of Northern Industry.  At the same time, though, I don’t think this changes the argument.  The Cayley Robinson poster is dated to 1924, which is the same date as I have seen given to a couple of the Norman Wilkinson posters.  Railway poster dating is not an exact science – the NRM itself dates them to 1923-48 – but I’d hazard a guess that these are all part of the same series.  Which means that putting these kind of images on a poster was, possibly, tried once as an experiment and then never done again.

Now this might have been because the Board of Directors of the LMS thought it unseemly, but it might be because they discovered that this kind of poster didn’t play well with the public.  And at this time, they were able to be reasonably certain about what was and wasn’t popular, because not only did the company sell copies of its posters to the public, it took some notice of how they were doing too.  In 1924, they were able to comment that this poster, by Maurice Greiffenhagen, was selling to the public “in large numbers” (more on this here if you’re interested).

‘Carlisle, the Gateway to Scotland', LMS poster, 1924. Maurice Greiffenhagen

There may be an implicit comparison here with the industrial scenes, or at least I’d like to think so.

None of this can be proven, of course, but what is the case is that this series does seem to have been the only one, which I think means that my overall point about the scarcity of these images (and especially after World War Two when a new technological and manufacturing Britain was going to take over the world) still stands.

But what about the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales, people complained in the comments.  What about posters like this (any excuse)?

Lander (Eric dates unknown) The English Lakes, original poster printed for BR(LMR) by Waterlow

Or indeed these, and many others like them?

Edwin Byatt Vintage railway poster 1940

Lune Valley 1950 poster Percy Drake Brookshaw

They are northern, granted, but they aren’t industrial which is the real gap in the imagery.  But as ‘mm’, who commented, points out there is another interesting divide to be found between northern and southern landscapes.  It’s a diversion, but it’s one well worth taking.

Maybe the northern landscapes are too wild and untamed to be fondly remembered in the sense you mean. Perhaps it is a safe, cultivated landscape we yearn for or think of as British!

I think this may be true, and it’s worth remembering that the Lake District only became popular, rather than being seen as a rather frightening and uncivilised wildness at the start of the eighteenth century.  There is definitely an ‘otherness’ to these places.

There is something else going on here too, which is a kind of conflation.  Englishness becomes a shorthand for Britishness.

Britain Land of Gardens poster for American tourism early 1950s

While England in its turn tends to be represented by the Southern.

Old england National Savings poster heritage

I thought we should have a few dog-ugly posters by the way, as it was all getting a bit safe and pretty further up there.

All of which means that, however much we admire the Lake District, or Scotland, or the Peak District, it would look a bit odd to have one of the images of these areas with ‘Britain’ or ‘England’ stuck at the bottom.  Although like all good generalisations, there are of course exceptions.

Come to Britain for motoring vintage tourist poster

All of this is covered in much more depth and complexity in David Matless’s peerless book Landscape and Englishness, and now that this has emerged from storage (hurrah) I will have to reread it and, I suspect, post on the subject again.

For the last word, however, I must return to the comments.  Nick S posted this wonderful bit of writing by Harry Pearson which comes, it turns out from a book about football.  But bear with me on this one, it’s not simply relevant, it sums the whole thing up to perfection.

In the North-East, England, or the notion of England, seems a long way off. The North-East is at the far corner of the country but it is separated by more than just miles. There is the wilderness of the Pennines to the west, the emptiness of the North Yorkshire moors to the south and to the north, the Scottish border. The nearest major city to Newcastle is Edinburgh, and that is in another country. Sometimes the North-East seemed more like an island than a region. And there was more. As a boy, I can remember looking through one of those colour illustrated encyclopaedias and coming upon a full-page picture that caught my attention. There were cottages festooned with hanging baskets, burgeoning gardens, white picket fences, a village green, a duck pond, a cricket match, a district nurse on a bicycle, and, doubtless, a future prime minister sitting outside a thatched pub sipping warm beer. The caption underneath read ‘An Everyday English Village Scene’…. this caption was clearly a mistake. Because I lived in an English village and it didn’t look anything like that!

“Twenty years later I went to see a friend of mine in Sonning-on-Thames. It was a hot June day and as we walked across the churchyard I realised that this was, spiritually if not figuratively, the village in the encyclopaedia…. This was England. England, their England. It wasn’t like the North-East at all.

Which is why you won’t often find a picture of a Northern scene with the caption ‘England’ or ‘Britain’ on it.  And even if you do, it definitely won’t be showing their industries.

War Games

When I posted this Games poster on the blog last week, I mentioned that there was more to be said about the subject.

Abram Games your britain fight for it now vintage WW2 poster 1942

I’ve been meaning to write about Abram Games’ war posters for a while now and that poster (which incidentally fetched £950 at Onslows when it was sold a few days ago) has finally made me do it.

Games did design some of the most striking and, in a few cases controversial, posters of the war, but you might be wondering how much more there is to be said than that.

Abram Games ATS poster blonde bombshell vintage World War Two poster

But these posters are actually an exception to the usual run of WW2 Home Front posters, something which isn’t often pointed out.  To start with, they were almost entirely designed for a particular subset of the Home Front: the serving soldier, whether at home or abroad.

Abram Games Kit ticket army poster vintage world war two propaganda

This is because Games didn’t work for MoI or one of the other ministries, nor even for one of the advertising agencies.  He created his own job in the army, which gave him great freedom to do exactly what he wanted – not only could he choose his style but in some cases he even chose the subject matter too.

Abram Games ventilate your quarters vintage ww2 army propaganda poster

Later on in the war he also had Frank Newbould as his assistant, which, given that Games was 27 and Newbould was a rather more experienced 59, must have been an interesting situation.  (If you want to know more about Games’ wartime service, there’s a good section on it in this book.)

This situation  meant that  Games was able, unlike almost any other designer in the war, to produce a coherent set of poster which were modern in both their design and their social message.  Sometimes their subject matter and execution were the same as the mainstream Home Front publicity and posters.

Abram Games Grow Your Own Food vintage ww2 propaganda poster army

On occasion, though, they were very different.  For example, Games’ army equivalent to the Careless Talk Costs Lives has a graphic representation of the possible results.  Men will die.

Abram Games Your Talk May Kill Your Comrades WW2 army propaganda poster

The above poster is perhaps the best-known, but the design below is even more explicit.

Abram Games Talk Kills vintage army poster world war two propaganda

Nothing similar was ever produced for the general public.  Whether posters should show such direct consequences of careless talk was debated more than once within the Ministry of Information during the war.  But the MoI always decided against ‘pictures which hurt’, turning down one proposed campaign as ‘too tough and realistic’.  Even this design by Norman Wilkinson kept death at arm’s length; the men in the foreground have survived.

NOrman wilkinson a few careless words vintage ww2 propaganda poster

When Games’ posters are included in more general surveys of Home Front posters, without any explanation of why they are different, this subtlety disappears.  The posters, instead, are seen to cover all approaches when that wasn’t the case.

Perhaps the most important results of Games’ freedom to work was the Your Britain Fight For It Now series.  These posters were not only designed by Games but Newbould too.

Frank Newbould Your Britain Fight For It Now ww2 propaganda poster army ABCA

The results are an example of their partnership of modern and traditional working at its best; the different posters would have appealed to very different people and so the message would have got across to the widest possible public.

Frank Newbould Your Britain Fight For It Now vintage ww2 propaganda poster army ABCA

But that’s a digression, because what’s important about these posters is their message.  Newbould’s posters are exhorting the soldiers to fight for an image of an idealised and traditional Britain (located, as this deep Britain tends to be, in the countryside).  Games’ designs use the same slogan but have a different message.  Fight, he is saying, for a better Britain after the war, and he locates this future in an urban and modern idiom.

Vintage world war two poster ABCA Abram Games

In the wake of the Beveridge Report in 1942, this wasn’t a particularly novel idea.  But it wasn’t one which was being expressed in posters elsewhere.  The Ministry of Information repeatedly applied to the Cabinet for permission to produce sets of posters along these lines, but the request was always turned down, quite possibly on the orders of Churchill himself.

Abram Games abca Finsbury Health Centre rickets vintage ww2 poster

All of which gives further resonance to Churchill’s banning of the Finsbury Health Centre poster above.  (I’ve written a fuller explanation of the controversy here if you would like to know more.)

The Ministry was clearly frustrated by this restriction, as can be seen by its use of Walter Spradbery’s The Proud City series

London The Proud City Walter Spradbery Vintage London Transport poster WW2

This series of posters came into being because they were commissioned by the London Passenger Transport Board, another organisation which was less constrained than the Ministry in terms of the propaganda it could produce.  But the MoI made use of this loophole too, paying not only for the posters to be printed in the tens of thousands, but also to be translated into multiple languages and distributed to Britain’s allies.

London The Proud City Walter Spradbery Vintage London Transport poster WW2 in Arabic

All of which underlines why it is so important to separate out Games’ work from the broader mass of Home Front posters and propaganda.  Because if they are all just lumped in together, as is so often the case, the results are misleading.

Games vote poster army world war two

Not only do we see a much more modern set of posters than the average person in the street ever did, we also believe that this message of building a better Britain was a commonplace.  But in doing so we are imposing our retrospective justifications for the war onto the past – and distorting it.  Because at the time this kind of propaganda was not taken for granted; rather it was something controversial and disputed – and what’s more, something which was definitely not seen on the streets of Britain during the war.

Abram Games army education poster world war two propaganda

If you think, incidentally, that I’ve been banging on about World War Two posters quite a bit recently, I have.  There is a good reason for this, too, but all will be revealed in the New Year.

All images, once again, from the VADS/IWM online archive.

The New Wave

I thought I’d said pretty much everything I could say about Sotherans by now, in particular about the unlikelihood of being able to sell posters at such prices in a world where, thanks to the internet, everyone should agree on what a poster is worth.   But it seems that modern technology  has made precisely no difference at all to their business model, because this year they have once again produced a new catalogue, and the prices are just as jaw-dropping as they have ever been.

Anglesey Norman Wilkinson LMS Poster 1930
Norman Wilkinson, 1930, £1,995 – sold

So far, so not news.  But this set of posters is worth taking a look at, because it marks an interesting change in the focus of the company, and so perhaps also a movement in the market more generally.

It is true that they still begin with the traditional railway landscape/Terence Cuneo favourites that we have come to know, like this Somerset poster by Jack Merriott.

Jack Merriott Somerset British Railways vintage poster 1960
Jack Merriott, 1960, £1,500

I do also have to note that this Somerset British Railways Map is apparently £760, unbacked, mostly because we bought one for £16.99 on eBay a while back.

JP Sayers British Railways Somerset Map
J P Sayers, 1937, £765

And then sold it for £56 a few years later.  I thought we’d done well, but clearly not.

But there aren’t as many of these as you’d expect.  Very soon the catalogue shifts into an entirely different gear, one which might be called cheerful British kitsch.

Bexhill on Sea vintage british railways poster 1961
Anonymous,1961, £800

In fact a few pages in the catalogue look more like a romp through Quad Royal than an up-market poster sale.

Page from sotherans catalogue

There are some good posters in here – I did actually type great and then deleted it, because mostly they’re not.  They’re bright, they’re very 1950s, but what they are not is classic graphic design (although I might just have to make an exception for a this stick of rock).

Eastbourne vintage travel poster 1950 Bromfield British Railways
Bromfield, 1950, £685 – sold

What’s really interesting though is that almost all of them have sold, and for prices that they just wouldn’t reach anywhere else.

Southport, vintage British Railways travel poster 1965
Anonymous, 1965 (??), £485

The interest in this style is not entirely a new thing.  When I first started going to poster auctions in about 2002, Christies had just started selling these kinds of poster, and they were doing very well in the their auctions too.  But when Christies introduced their new £800 minimum lot price, this rather ruled them out.  Clearly though, as this catalogue shows, the demand for them hasn’t gone away.

R M Lander come to hastings by train vintage british railways poster 1962
Lander, 1962, £685 – sold

Sotherans could be accused of pushing it to the limit, mind you.  As I’ve mentioned before, these two Harry Stevens posters are not exactly rare.

Harry Stevens vintage London Transport poster Travel Enquiries
Harry Stevens, 1974, £85 – sold

HArry Stevens litter vintage 1974 London Transport poster
Harry Stevens, 1974, £85 – sold

In fact they have been swilling all over eBay for some time.  Right now you can buy a framed copy of the top poster for £21 should you wish, and a portrait version of the lower one for £23.  Which does make me wonder whether Sotheran’s buyers are too foppish and tweedy to have come across the internet at all.

But it goes further.  There are a slew of posters on there without much in the way of merit.

Birthday Savings vintage post office savings bank poster Rex Moreton 1960
Rex Moreton, 1960, £195 – sold

Happy and Carefree vintage Post office savings bank poster GPO 1960
Anonymous, c.1960, £125

They’ve sold too, when you’d struggle to get a tenner for them on eBay.  Really, who are these people? And how can I sell them some posters?

To be fair, there are also one or two nice GPO posters in there too, like this Eric Fraser.

Eric Fraser, vintage GPO poster, Neutron generator c1930-40
Eric Fraser, c.1930-40, £225

Along with one or two good LT ones too.

Peter Roberson London Museums vintage London Transport poster 1956
Peter Roberson, 1956, £500

Enid Marx vintage London Transport poster 1965 The Science Museum
Enid Marx, 1965, £500

Although this William Fenton has to be in the ‘stretching it to get a tenner on eBay’ category.

William Fenton dull bus vintage London Transport poster of dull buses
William Fenton, 1969, £250

While you’d have to pay me to take this one away.

Bus Stop Poster 1970
Anonymous, 1970, £55

Worth noting too is this Mount Evans, which has to be one of the better pieces of post war design in the whole catalogue.

Mount Evans Britain CoI poster 1967
Mount/Evans, 1967, £350

The style is modern rather than kitsch, but it still represents the same movement away from landscapey railway posters and towards something more interesting (at least if you’re me).

So what does it all mean?  My first guess would have been that the world is running out of railway posters and so dealers like Sotherans have been forced to diversify.  But in fact, it’s the more modern posters which have been selling for them, leaving more traditional fare like the Somerset posters still for sale.  So this must be what people, even the rareified breed who go to Sotherans want these days.  Which is probably worth noting, not least because it gives the rest of us a good chance to do some upselling from eBay.

Now, I would send you off to the Sotherans catalogue to take a look at what’s sold for yourself.  But literally while I was typing this post, they took that page down, although you can still see an online version of the print catalogue.  So I think that more of the posters than I have listed are sold, but I’m not able to check that any more.  They have, however, replaced it with a new set of posters for sale, including a very interesting set of GPO Savings posters. I’ll take a proper look at them (and their prices) soon, but if you want to take a peek before then, you can find them here.

Query

Today on Quad Royal, a reader’s question.  And it’s not one I can answer, so I thought I’d throw it open to you lot.

Take a look at this.

Norman Wilkinson Vintage Railway poser London Whitehall  - American

A classic.  A Norman Wilkinson classic from 1930 to be precise. But now take a look at the small print.

Wilkinson small print

Travel information from the Associated British Railways Inc, New York.

Now a bit of research tells me that this was a body formed by all the British Railway companies in the early 1930s whose job was to promote rail tourism in the UK to Americans, and which lasted until the Second World War. Their imprint appears on other posters – and in fact we bought one from the states with their name and address pasted over the original LNER text on a thin strip of paper.

But none of this answers the question I was asked.  Which is, does this make any difference to the value of the poster?  Is it a rarity, or do the usual considerations of artist, image, condition still count for more?  I don’t know, so I said I’d put the question out to you lot.  What do you think?