railway poster Archives - Page 6 of 16

Stuff Stuff Stuffety Stuff

eBay

It’s time for a round-up of what’s for sale at the moment. I’ve been swerving this for a few days, mainly because there are bits on offer all over the place in a rather scattergun fashion. But bear with me and we will take a tour, starting with the Swann Galleries.

Unfortunately their new catalogue doesn’t have the stellar offerings of their last Modernist posters sale, and the British posters are spotted all the way through. In a way, this is a good thing, as it shows that they’re being taken seriously rather than tucked in a corner like some elderly aunt to be patronised. But it does make flicking through the catalogue much harder work than it might have been.

It also makes for some interesting juxtapositions. This English bathing beauty from 1955 is valued at a rather startling $700-1,000 (by someone who has clearly never experienced the reality of Ramsgate).

But just a few pages before is her American counterpart from 1960. Which does rather make me think that the Americans did some parts of ‘midcentury’ better than we did.

She’s also a bit less high-maintenance at $500-750.

For the same price as the Ramsgate bathing beauty you could instead have this rather fine Shell poster by Colin Statham, about whom I can find out nothing at all (except that someone of that name is very active in amateur dramatics in Berkshire).

I did learn that this design is apparently the only poster in this series with a background colour that isn’t neutral, so there you go.

But for me one of the most interesting posters on offer in the sale is also one of the least visually interesting.

My mind is on the subject of World War Two posters quite a bit at the moment, so you may not be as excited as I am. But it is worth thinking about, for two reasons. One is that it’s a reminder of the fact that design often wasn’t the main driver when these posters were produced. This comes as part of a lot of nine posters, which also include: Only Use Boiled Water; How to get Help After Air-Raid Damage; This Shelter is Not Gas Proof; You Can Get Water At; If You Have Lost Your Home; For Help and Information Go To; This is a Rest Centre. All of these must have been designed for immediate use in the aftermath of a raid, so their concern is being visible and legible, not being pretty. Each and every wartime poster had a purpose, and ‘good design’ was only used when it might help that purpose, it wasn’t their main reason for being.

It’s also a reminder of just how many posters were produced during the war, and that not only were the numbers vast, they are also pretty uncountable today. The Imperial War Museum Archive on VADS doesn’t seem to have a record of any of these nine, and I’ve never seen them reproduced anywhere else before. Which means that there are probably plenty of others which have disappeared entirely, and so a full record of every poster of the war will never be possible. So keep your eyes peeled, and you could perhaps hit the marketing jackpot with the next ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’. Although perhaps not with these posters.

Back on this side of the Atlantic, there are also a couple of railwayana auctions, at Talisman and Gteat Central Railwayana. While both have a reasonable selection of perfectly fine railway posters (although, as ever neither estimates nor dates), nothing is leaping out screaming ‘buy me!’. Although Great Central Railwayana do have this Studio Seven gem, which would probably do quite well in the Swann Auctions.

And this, which I am just amused by.

The catalogue tells me that it is ‘from the series Famous Public Schools on the LMS’ so there are more to collect should you feel the urge.

I can only ever bring myself to admire this Pat Keely London Transport poster from afar, rather than actually wanting to own it and have it on the wall.

At Talisman, as well as no estimates or dates, there aren’t even proper pictures, so you will just have to look to the bottom right here to see what I am going on about.

I rather like that, partly for the typography, but mainly because I cannot imagine the circumstances under which Weston Super Mare would be better still. Than borstal, perhaps, but that’s about it. It’s got a muddy estuary instead of sea, a tide that goes out half way to Wales and a prevailing wind that gets sand into each and every sandwich. I used to wonder why there were so many railway posters advertising it, until I realised that no one would go there otherwise.

And finally eBay, which has been a bit quiet recently, which might be down to the summer holiday lull beginning to kick in. Although MrSpencer007 would like you to pay the best part of ninety quid for this.

I, for one, am not biting.

A similar aura of optimism applies to the pricing of this Lowestoft poster too.

Cheerful, yes, but not £450 worth of cheerful I don’t think.

But there are more reasonable prices to be found, most notably with a seller called 2mkantiques, who has clearly found a whole treasure trove of posters somewhere, 93 to be precise. It’s a real mixed bag, with everything from Dutch bus posters to 1970s Sealink advertising, but there are some good ones in there, and mostly at reasonable prices.

I like both of these 1950s travel posters, for example, and they’re at £150 and £100 respectively.

Plus the seller will take offers, so you may even get them for less than that. There are also some National Savings posters, at slightly higher prices – this Norman Wilkinson is on offer for £250, for example.

But the real star exhibit, for me at least, is this, yours for £199 or thereabouts.

Now, what does that signature say? I could almost swear it reads Henrion. Anyone else got a thought on that? It has a pair, too, which is on for £225 even though it’s not quite as nice.

There have been a couple of other finds on the Bay too, but they haven’t made this post because we’ve bought them. Sorry about that. More on a few of those later in the week.

Back again

designers, other

I know that I keep promising to come back to subjects on this blog, and then it never quite happens. There on the other hand, sometimes subjects come back to me, especially designers. One of the great joys of writing about a particular designer is that quite often people get in contact with their own memories of the person concerned. I’ve blogged about this before with Hans Unger, and it’s wonderful to get a sense of how much that person was respected and remembered. Recently, quite a few people emailed who had worked with Pieter Huveneers. In addition to being a great designer, he must also have been an inspiring boss and mentor.

I was also sent this by Jim Pennington, who never worked for Huveneers but does know good design when it comes his way.

It’s manual of transistors from the late 195os or early 1960s. Everything you need to know about the valves of the day, apparently. But rather lovely.

More surprisingly, a lot of people have got in contact about Denis Constanduros who, you may remember, did a few rather lovely posters for Shell and then saw how the world was going and went off to produce historical TV dramas instead.

He seems to have had a large extended family which, combined with a highly googlable surname,means that lots of his relatives have found the blog and got in touch. His grandson sent me a very interesting range of material, including this 1939 article from the Radio Times.

So, in between the water carrying and play writing he was still painting as well. There is also a picture of him and his aunt Mabel from the year before.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Spector, who isn’t a relative, sent me this book jacket illustration by Denis, for one of his aunt’s books.

This only survived by dint of being a wartime rarity. Jonathan bought a wholly other book, called People are Curious, written by James Hanley and published in reprint edition in 1945. But on the reverse of the jacket, off centre, was this – obviously the result of wartime paper rationing. I think I preferred his posters though.

That’s not the only email that arrives here at Crownfolio Towers either. Quad Royal is now important enough, it seems, to get press releases. So should you want this poster, for example, for a scooter which was apparently ‘a joy to own, as long as someone else was paying the repair bills’,

I can tell you that there’s a gallery in Canada with just the thing for you.

Back on home turf, I’ve also been contacted by VintageSeekers, who are a new antiques site with a small number vintage posters on their books.

What Vintage Seekers is, though, is a shop window for dealers, which means that you are paying not only dealers’ prices, but commission on top. So the poster above, quite apart from being for a place which you’d only want a poster of if you’d never been there, is £695.

I did get mildly excited when I saw a link to a Whisky Galore poster, as I had some memory that it was a good one. What I was thinking of was this, which is by Tom Eckersley and I have been meaning to put up for your delectation for ages now.

What I actually saw when I got to the page was this.

Which is rather more in the style of a Ladybird book and, furthermore, will set you back £2,800.

All of which is enough to send me back into the arms of eBay, where even the silly prices suddenly look more reasonable. This wartime Pat Keely is £99.95.

While the listing doesn’t mention his name, this car ferry poster is by Lander (and dates from 1960, fact fans).

This is a bit of an oddity, as I have no idea what the Pye logo is doing there, particularly as the poster seems to have ended up in America.

Although apparently the poster says that Pye were Britain’s largest exporters of radio and television. I’m still not really any the wiser.

Finally, what I need right now is a time machine, to go straight back to 1973 and attend this.

Imagine the bargains there would be for the taking.

Buy, Buy, Sell, Buy

auctions, eBay

There are a lot of posters about at the moment; it’s only Monday morning and I’m exhausted just thinking about it. Not only have there just been the Christies and Onslows sales, but there’s also quite a bit coming up on eBay too. I’d like to sum it up in some kind of executive summary of the market at the moment, but however hard I try, this eludes me. So I’m afraid you’ll just have to bear with me as we sift through the evidence.

One feeling I have is that prices, and more importantly expected prices, are going up. Take these eBay items, for example. There’s a signed, recent, Tom Eckersley poster for £295, which has to be more than even a gallery would charge for it.

In an interesting take on eBay selling strategies, this was previously on offer for a £175 Buy It Now, but when it failed to sell, they relisted it and upped the price.

Even more excitable is the seller of this 1935 GPO Schools poster by John Armstrong, for sale for a rather steep $2,950 Buy It Now.

He is also accepting Best Offers, as he explains in rather breathless red text on his listing.

The highest offer of the 3 that I have received is $ 2,155 I will let it go to the next offer of $ 2,200.

While I know that this is a classic poster reproduced in all sorts of texts, I don’t actually like it very much and so I am able to resist this offer, or indeed pretty much any kind of offer which didn’t involve giving it to me for free.

These Shell posters, even though they are a full set of the highly-desirable Trees, by the highly-desirable SR Badmin, are surely up at the top end of the value range too at £350.

And I say this with some confidence, given that we have just got four of the Roads of Britain in this series for the grand sum of £15, including (I have said this before, and I will say it again) my favourite Shell educational poster ever, the Ridgeway by David Gentleman.

This coach poster, too, is probably also overpriced at £75 – although it’s very fashionably retro and so probably would go for much more than its £75 asking price in the right gallery.

Expensive doesn’t just apply to posters, either. This lovely little booklet with illustrations by Barbara Jones has a starting price of £90.

I begrudge this price a bit less though; it’s a rare book, published in just after the war and on that very contemporary subject of good design in the home. Having said all that, you can also find it online for just £60, so maybe it is a bit over-priced too.

The Christies auction didn’t come cheap either. These two posters were the stars of the show, both dramatically exceeding their estimates.

The Alexeieff above went for £34,850 (est. £15-20,000) while the McKnight Kauffer Underground poster sold for £27,500 (est. £8-12,000).

The Kauffer poster is particularly interesting, because a copy also turned up in the Swann Galleries auction a few weeks before, where it went for £20,580, so the price wasn’t just a flash in the pan (or even a flash from the fist).

As for the Christies’ auction as a whole, my initial reaction was that the prices seemed steep; but when I took a closer look, most sales were within the range of the estimates. What this means, I don’t know (and would love to have anyone else’s thoughts on the matter). My guess would be that some posters are getting more expensive, and that Christies are now, with their minimum lot policies, concentrating on these. There may also be psychology involved, though, too; if there’s nothing priced at £150 or even £250 in an auction, does it make the high prices seem more reasonable? To some people at least, if not me.

But fear not bargain hunters, because there are still cheap posters on eBay, even cheap underground posters. These ducks, for example, are starting at just £29.99, and are linen backed to boot.

They’re by Richard Barrett Talbot Kelly and date from 1948, while this 1923 MacDonald Gill London Transport map of Barrie’s Kensington Gardens is even cheaper at £25, although it hasn’t reached its reserve at that price, so may not be as cheap as it first appears.

Elsewhere – in the U.S. to be precise – this 1947 London Transport Central Line extension poster by Hans Schleger/Zero is perhaps better described as reasonable at £148 rather than cheap. But it is wonderful enough to justify the price.

Although if you do want a cheap Zero poster, that’s on offer as well; this British Railways museum poster from the early 1960s is a bit more crumpled, but then it is on with a starting price of only £2.99.

If that doesn’t tickle your fancy, perhaps you might like this Daphne Padden Post Office Savings Bank poster – one of my favourites – currently still at its starting price of £10.

Once again, eBay also offers me the opportunity of pointing out how badly designed most National Savings posters are. This is also a savings poster, and it has an owl on too, but that’s all it has in common with the one above.

It, however is priced at £49.99. I have nothing more to say on the matter.

All that remains is the Onslows sale, which seemed to be neither cheap nor expensive, so I’d be interested in hearing anyone else’s thoughts, or indeed about any bargains you may have bought. But it is worth remembering that they do take offers on unsold lots (until 18th June) so a second look at the online catalogue might prove worth your while.

When did you last see an auction?

auctions

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, 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, 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.

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, 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, 1936, est. £300-400

But there are other treasures too.

Abram Games, 1964, est. £200-300

Enid Marx, 1964, est. £150-200

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.

Jean Colin, 1963, est. £250-300

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, 1942, est. £200-300

Manfred Reiss, 1948, ext. £200-250

While these three are from Van Sabben.

Beaumont, 1960 (?), est. €160

Rothholz, 1948, est. €280

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, 1950, est. €150

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, 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…

Queer Things

eBay

Only last week I was complaining that there really weren’t enough British food posters when this arrived through the post. I’d entirely forgotten than we’d bought it from eBay.

Although it’s only tangentially about food, and quite informatively prosaic to boot, I still rather like it. So much so that I would have hung it on the kitchen wall, were it not for the fact that there’s no more space. And the little hanger at the top of the metal bar (it’s got metal strips at the top and bottom just like a Shell educational poster) fell off when I photographed it. Never mind.

Another recent purchase was this splendidly information-free poster.

Thanks to the interweb, I am able to tell you that it is a British Railway poster by Myers (whose signature is just about visible bottom right), it dates from the 1950s, and it also existed with text too (image from the NMSI collection).

All of which leaves me with a couple of questions. Firstly, why are there two versions? Was the typeless one designed to go on the railway aficionado’s wall, and sold as such? Ours isn’t the only one, because the NRM have a copy too so there must have been a plan, even if I’m not quite sure what it was.

But it’s never come up on sale as far as I can tell. Faster All Along The Line with its title on has been sold a couple of times at auction, for £280-300, at Onslows and Morphets. But is it worth more or less with type? I have no idea – does anyone else?

Finally, we bought this simply because it existed, and so I am sharing it with you for exactly the same reason.