Tom Eckersley Archives - Page 3 of 13

Beware of the Swarf

archives

Attic find of the year has to be awarded to RoSPA, who went into their warehouse last year and discovered 700 old posters. I dream of doing something like that. Especially if it produces posters like this one.

This is by Leonard Cusden from 1951, and it’s the original artwork, as is, it seems, much of what was discovered in the back of the warehouse.

Not everything is of quite such high quality graphically, although this Bruce Angrave from the 1940s is rather fine.

While this poster by Digby Willis is just rather fantastic quite regardless of the style.

I may be needing a copy of that when small Crownfolio hits the teenage years.

Many of the rest, like these two by Roland Davies and F Blake respectively, are more from the Ladybird books or Woman magazine school of design than high graphics.

While this one, by Gus from 1963, is just plain odd, mostly because it makes me feel very sorry for the hen.

Maybe it’s the gender politics making me uneasy.

Overall, though, the impression that these posters give is that RoSPA’s quality control systems, so thorough during the Second World War and in the years after, disappeared later on.

And they really did have a quality control system; their Publicity Committee was staffed by, amongst others, Tom Eckersley and Ashley Havinden, whose keen eyes really did let little dross through. Here are the couple of posters that we own from this period, by G R Morris and Eckersley himself.

RoSPA are a really interesting organisation: there is a lot more to say about their posters and I’m rather surprised to discover that I’ve not written anything about them properly on the blog yet. This is even more surprising given that their wartime posters get a mention in the book (did I mention the book? that I have written one? and that you can order it from Amazonalready?). But most of what we tend to come across are the later posters, and these in the main would have caused the sensitive disposition of Ashley Havinden some pain I think.

More posted here if you are a glutton for punishment. To make up for that, I’ll go through some archives and dig out a few gems one of these days, because there are some great ones to be seen, most notably on VADS. This one, which I’d never seen before now, is by Theyre Lee Elliott.

However, I am a mere amateur in this field, because if you really want to know about RoSPA, the person you need to be reading is Paul Rennie,who wrote his PhD thesis on their wartime poster output, and has condensed this into a couple of articles which you can find here and here.

You can even – such are the wonders of the internet – download his entire thesis from the British Library if you like. I’d recommend it, it’s a good read.

If you’d rather form your own opinions about the posters, RoSPA are exhibiting 40 of their finds in Birmingham next week. Two words of warning, though. Firstly the exhibition is only on for three days. But perhaps more importantly, RoSPA are mostly exhibiting reproductions rather than the originals themselves. That said, it would probably still be pretty interesting, so if anyone goes, can you let me know all about it please?

Finally, from one Eckersley to another. I mentioned this showcard last week when it appeared on eBay.

The starting price was 99p; it finally went for £317. I know it’s easier to display than a poster but even so, I’m still astonished. Thoughts and explanations – along with corresponding valuations of the poster itself – in the comments box please.

Cheap and Expensive

eBay, Uncategorized

Bonus extra blog post today (although I can’t type very well at the moment because my fingers are freezing). I was going to put the eBay news on the end of yesterday’s post, but then it turned out that there was quite a lot on offer. So now they have a post of their own instead.

The posters up on eBay at the moment seem to fall into a few tidy categories. Firstly are expensive posters which probably have a right to be expensive. Top of this list is this Jack Merriott British Railways poster.

With just a few hours to go it’s already at £415 – a price which will probably have risen even higher by the time I press ‘publish’ on this post. It might well make almost as much as the version which went at Morphets two years ago, which sold for £600. For the right poster, it’s starting to look as though eBay wins hands down over the auction houses, simply because the fees are so much lower. That’s if you’re selling of course; for buyers, I’m not so sure. I still slightly balk at spending that much money on something I haven’t seen in the flesh.

Another example of the righteously expensive is another British Railways poster, also going today and currently at £142.

Finally in this category is a lovely London Transport poster which has been mentioned in dispatches on here before.

The Buy It Now price of £390 strikes me as a bit more of a dealer level than an eBay level. But then it is framed, and given what the Findhorn poster is going for anything could be possible these days.

Category two is expensive things which are currently going cheap. Like this Guinness poster which is currently at £10.50 but, if it is original, is going for a song.

Of course whether something is original or not is always the question looming over every eBay listing. The dimensions look right on this one, although it is a bit clean. Any thoughts anyone?

Also cheap is this very odd survival – although I have no idea what it should actually be worth, I suspect it is more than the current £20. It’s a poster for the 1929 Royal Opera House Ball. What larks.

But it’s rather good, isn’t it. No word of an artist though.

In the other corner is expensive things which probably should be cheap, and we’ve got just one contender here, this Tom Purvis, which I have difficulty imagining someone paying £149 for.

Now don’t get me wrong, because it’s a perfectly good poster, but I just don’t think many people want to hang it on their walls. Or do they? I shall watch and wait and see.

Then of course there are cheap things that probably should stay that way. I have a sneaking affection for this British Railways poster – it’s probably the cat – but that still doesn’t make it worth very much.

So £2.99 is probably about right. While even £20 seems a bit steep for this National Savings poster, even with the Coronation interest.

Why were National Savings posters so uniformly dreary, when so many of the posters around them were so good? Truly I do not know.

Those were going to be your lot, but even as I’ve been writing, some more listings have been passed over to me, and they both come under the heading of things that do not fit into my neat categories at all because I have no idea what they are worth.

This man is selling a big set of Kodak shop display posters. Given the spelling of color, they are probably American, but I won’t hold that against them too much.

The starting price for each is £19.99 but I have no idea if that is fair or not.

This, meanwhile, is not a poster despite appearances to the contrary. It’s a showcard.

But as it’s currently priced at 99p I can say with some confidence that it is a bargain. And would look rather good on someone’s bookshelves, I think.

Give that penguin a fish!

other

A recent acquisition on eBay was a few copies of Modern Publicity from the late 1950s and early 1960s. I was going to share their delights with you anyway, but when I looked into the archives I realised that I’ve never actually blogged about this properly at all. Then when I looked a bit harder I discovered that Designers in Britain has only ever been mentioned in passing as well. As both are rather fabulous resources, I will endeavour to put at least some of this to rights over the next few weeks. But first, a brief introduction.

Modern Publicity is an international annual, published by The Studio group, which covers what would now be called graphic design – posters, printed material, packaging and trade marks – from around the world. In contrast, Designers in Britain does what it says on the tin and only deals with UK design and designers, but includes everything from letterheads to large pieces of industrial machinery. While both of them suffer from being predominantly printed in black and white, they are nonetheless well worth your attention. Not only do you get to look at lots of wonderful pieces all in one place, but they’re also fascinating insights into what critics and designers thought was good at the time it was produced. Which isn’t always the same as the things we like now.

So, what did people admire in the late 1950s and early 1960s? Or to be more precise, which pieces of graphic design were considered good enough to stand next to the cream of international design? One answer is not the designers that you might expect. Tom Eckersley gets just one poster included in the two Modern Publicity annuals from the 1950s.

You’ll be relieved to hear that he does rather better in 1962, with three designs included, amongst them this Omo poster which I’ve never seen before.

Abram Games also receives a rave review in 1958 for this Guinness poster, which is chosen to open the entire book.

Only where both name and product are already household words is such a method possible. To adopt the plan for an unknown advertiser would be to court disaster.

After that, it all gets a bit more unexpected. I’ve mentioned before that Harry Stevens is very popular in these kinds of publications, and that’s as true in these annuals as it ever was.

Printed in lemon, vermilion, cobalt, orange, pink and black, the caption says. I don’t think black and white is really fair on it, do you? And should you have a copy in colour, please do let me know, I’d love to see it.

An even more surprising regular is Ken Bromfield. Now he comes up every now and then on here, mostly as a designer of quite nice railway posters. But the editors of Modern Publicity love his work – he gets four pieces of work in the 1959 edition alone, including this poster.

This is the artwork from the NMSI collection, because I can’t find the actual poster anywhere. But he’s clearly an artist I should take a proper look at one of these days.

There are also a few unexpected gems to be discovered, like this poster by Lander.

I can’t find a decent picture of this anywhere, which is really frustrating as it looks great, and must look even better in colour, (and I am getting quite close to having another rant about the inadequacies of the National Railway Museum catalogue as a result of my looking too). Again, any pointers gratefully received. Or indeed copies of the poster.

There are others of this ilk as well – it’s always worth being reminded of this London Transport poster by Edwin Tatum.

I’m also happy to see anything at all by Arpad Elfer, although these penguins are particularly splendid.

There’s plenty more where that came from. Here, just as an example, are Karo and Zero together on one page (did you see what they did there?).

What a world it must have been with those advertisements in it.

Then there are the people I’ve just never heard of before. Who, for example was Petronella Hodges? She did this.

And this too.

But she appears precisely nowhere in Google. A mystery, it seems. But the clue lies in the small print. Both of these designs were produced by J Walter Thompson, so my guess would be that Petronella Hodges was an art director there at the end of the 1950s. Quite apart from conjuring up images of a British version of Mad Men, it’s also a pointer to a very specific change that was going on. The jobbing freelance designer would become an increasingly rare species, with only the very best surviving. More and more, this kind of design would be done in house at the agencies, by this new breed of Art Director.

In amongst all of this, I realise that I’ve hardly even mentioned the 1962 edition, and there’s lots going on in there, as even the British make the move from whimsy to modernism. So that will have to get a post to itself another day. In the meantime, have a couple more rare gems from the late 50s, by Abram Games and E Tatum, again. There’s someone else I’m going to need to find out more about, isn’t it…

Profit Margin

auctions, eBay

Following on from the comments on my last piece about the inexplicable gap between eBay prices and elsewhere, a couple of instructive compare and contrasts for you.

Firstly, this excellent piece of sixties-iana, about which I know nothing except the rather obvious fact that it is for Pan Am.

Oh, and that its current asking price is $3,250. If you’re tempted, it’s in an online exhibition of travel posters held by the International Vintage Poster Dealers Association. I am not, you will be unsurprised to learn, a member.

However, if you are more of a fan of the poster than the price, then you can rue your missed opportunity, because it did turn up on eBay at the end of last year, where it fetched just $384.99.

Example two we have seen only the other day, as it’s Victor Pasmore’s exhibition poster which is up at Christies next month.

This too came up on eBay only about six weeks ago, when it went for just £125. In case you need reminding, the Christies estimate is £600-800.

Now I know that price can depend on condition, but even so the discrepancies are huge. And given that both these posters are fairly rare (I have never ever seen either of them before now), the odds must be quite good that it’s the same poster being sold on.

One more example, although in this case the price discrepancy is partly explained by the fact that the original listing is in German. Tom Eckersley’s book on Poster Design, the source of this wonderful illustration.

Now the last time this went past on eBay, the asking price £75, give or take a penny. But the lucky purchaser in the German auction got it for just one euro. And you can’t really blame that on the whole thing being written in foreign, because it did say ‘Tom Eckersley’ very clearly in the title.

So, eBay: an enigma and a mystery. And probably also quite a good business model if you’re interested in buying cheap and selling expensive. Any economists out there with any more interpretations?

While we’re on the subject of Tom Eckersley, another way round high auction prices is available. The V&A are selling reproductions of his Keep Britain Tidy Poster as part of the merchandising for their Modern British Design show.

Which I suppose may mean that there is an Eckersley poster in there somewhere, along with everything else. I really ought to go and see that and we are going to London in a few weeks time. But given that we are already planning to subject small Crownfolio to the Jeremy Deller exhibition, the V&A might be a step too far for one day. Perhap we’ll go and see the dinosaurs instead.

King listing

eBay

All I seem to do at the moment on this blog is write about eBay. In part this is because I’ve got my head thoroughly stuck into writing a book instead, and so there isn’t much mental bandwidth left for thinking about posters. (A normal service will be resumed in due course, I promise). But it’s also because eBay keeps chucking wonderful stuff at me. Take a look at these.

What you are seeing there is a complete set of King Penguins, curently at £235 without having reached their reserve. But I don’t really mind what they sell for because the photographs – and obviously the books themselves – are artworks in their own right.

A comprehensive condition report which is at the same time a thing of beauty. I like that.

And this is just a small selection, there are loads more on the listing if you’d like to take a look.

While I’ve got your attention, you might also like to know about these posters.

Three late Tom Eckersleys, all with a starting price of £50, but be warned, the bids have started to come in already.

Runabout

designers

Mr Crownfolio has been diversifying into ephemera again. But I can’t really complain when it’s as good as this. And anyway, we haven’t had a nice Eckersley on the blog for a while.

But this isn’t some niche piece of design for a high-end firm. What we have here is a popular leaflet produced by a giant nationalised industry. I can’t think of anyone working in a similar way today. Which is more than a shame, to me that represents a loss of respect for other people – respect for their intelligence and taste, but also a respect in terms of making the world better looking rather than uglier. And that’s quite something to lose.