travel poster Archives - Page 8 of 8

Sepsis, fuel and dark beer

auctions

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, the Onslows catalogue is now up and complete – eighteen lovely pages of posters for you to look at it, and all of which you can bid for via the internet.

So with the sale less than two weeks away, I thought I’d better take a proper look.

If you are a fan of a) World War One and Two, b) Guinness or c) French posters, you’re in luck, as there’s plenty of all of those.

This Mount/Evans salvage poster is probably my favourite of the WW2 lots – and one I’ve never seen before as well. Large tranches of the rest – unless you like H.M. Bateman cartoons – are more of historical than graphic interest. Although, having said that, I rather like this railway fuel saving poster too.

As well as this fantastically stark warning – also from the railways.

At an estimate of £70-£100, I might even think about that, were it not for the fact that I’d never ever put it up on the wall.

Then (lots 246 – 250 should you be looking for them) there are a small cache of classics, including Henrion, Keeley and three by Abram Games.

Every one a classic, but all also sufficiently grim that I can’t see any of them going up around the house any time soon.

In the world of Guinness, meanwhile, there are a few Gilroy classics on offer, but I rather like this 1962 one by R Peppe, not just for being different, but it does help.

And after that, I just got a bit overwhelmed. There are film posters, London Transport posters – including this 1953 gem by Sheila Robinson.

We once sold a poster of hers once; with hindsight I have no idea why.

There’s also this 1964 design for Kew Gardens, which is by Tom Eckersley’s wife, Mary Kessel, poster trivia fans.

There are of course railway posters, including Terence Cuneo’s Pictures of Trains, lots of 1972 Munich Olympic posters about which I know nothing, and – as mentioned in my last post – industrial quantities of Shell educational posters, at least 22, although I might well have missed some. The Hillier is still the best one on offer, although I am also a big fan of the David Gentleman series on The Roads of Britain.

There’s at least one missing here – The Great West Road with his wonderful image of Silbury Hill – and quite possibly more, but they’re still a great set on a deeply under-rated subject. But I will not digress.

If your a fan of Kraftwerk, you might want to buy this.

And finally (because I am rambling furiously and must stop) I like this, for no good reason at all.

Surely that prize specimen has to be worth more than the £30-40 estimate.

This is of course a fantastically partial review of what’s on offer, and has almost certainly left out all the most valuable posters. So please do and take a look for yourselves, and I’ll come back once the auction’s over and see what I missed out first time around.

Great Northern Games

designers

Today, a public information broadcast for those of you in the North of England.

No, not that the London Underground is more efficient than trams. Rather, Abram Games : Maximum Meaning, Minimum Means is opening at the Dean Clough Crossley Gallery in Huddersfield (actually the gallery is in Halifax I am told, sorry about that) on Saturday.

This is a Design Museum touring exhibition, of posters, sketches, product designs and so on, and has to be well worth the price of admission, because it’s free. Rude not to if you ask me.

A couple of caveats though. One is not to look at the Dean Clough website if you want to find out about it, as there’s nothing there – I got the information about the exhibition from here instead.

And I also can’t promise you that any of these posters will be there; I’m afraid that I’ve just been pleasing myself and finding some less well known of his designs. But do let me know what they are showing if you do go.

If you have to ask, you can’t afford it

eBay, other

Often, I end up writing about posters on here that I, for one, can’t afford. Like the Royston Cooper Hastings that I mentioned last week, which is fantastic, but at £1000 a pop, I’m probably never going to own it. I’ve always rather fancied this 1951 Abram Games design too.

But as it was last sighted going for £850 at Morphets, it’s unlikely to be making an appearance on our walls any time soon.

Here, however, is something which puts all of that into perspective. Something so expensive that they don’t even dare tell you the price.

Perhaps I’d better let them describe it.

This outstanding collection of original vintage posters includes many Countries, all Periods, all Topics, all Styles, and most Artists. For major poster designers represented, see the ARTISTS page. This is an ensemble of finest Graphic Designs, covering Graphic History since its beginnings. It is a unique investment opportunity for Museums, Universities, Corporations or Private to establish or complete a significant collection.

(And I’m sorry, but I can’t help hearing that paragraph spoken by a snappily-dressed Russian meercat. Simples.)

What they mean is 25,ooo posters. Although only (only!) 17,000 different ones if you discount the duplicates. How would you even know which were duplicates if you had that many posters? I forget what posters we own, and ours all fit under the spare bed.

They look like this.

And this.

And so on and so on.

If you want to see the full extent of what you’d get for your un-named price, they have their own website here.

They’re the collection of Eric Kellenberger, a Swiss architect who started collecting posters in the late 1960s as a cost-effective way of providing art for his clients’ walls. (I seem to remember my own excuse for beginning to buy posters being some similar thing about value for money art; a rationalisation that is blown out of the water by the sheer number of posters that we now own but don’t display.)

Apart from being rather overwhelmed by its sheer size, I don’t have a lot to say about this, mainly because it’s almost entirely foreign. So much so that the BOAC poster above (c1955) is the only British one I could confidently identify. There is also a Jersey one, which I can’t find elsewhere, and another with a Kangaroo urging me to Buy Australian Sultanas, which I can live without. Both the dog and the kangaroo look a bit threatening, if you ask me.

The artist list also mentions Zero, but I can’t see any images.

But it’s probably a good job it’s all foreign, because I doubt I could afford to buy one of these, never mind twenty-five thousand. Anyone else up for it?

Meanwhile elsewhere on the web, a classic pre-war railway poster is up for auction on eBay.

It falls into the category of picture of a train where they want you to see its workings, which makes it quite valuable, if not generally my cup of tea. But its auction history tells a little story about perceived value and eBay.

Firstly the seller, posterisland, put it on for Best Offer, with a guide price of £2,250. Funnily enough, no one bought it.

They probably thought that they were being reasonable, as the poster did go for £2,200 at Morphets (and £1,900, and £1,800; he had three…). But that was for near-perfect nick; this one is a bit battered. And it’s on eBay.

Then they tried again, as an auction with a £99.99 start price, but also a £1,750 Buy It Now. Then someone must have told him something because he took it off again twenty minutes later.

Now it is up for auction again, with a start price of £99.99, no scary Buy It Now price, and it has three bids. And I suspect it will go quite a bit higher by the time it finishes today. Although possibly not quite as high as the seller would like. We shall see.

If you do bid and are disappointed, though, I can offer some consolation.

The chance to do it in cross stitch. Kits available online. There is nothing I can add to that.

Vintage design for modern times

Matching poster to artist, one local auction at a time…

auctions

A few interesting posters are coming up for auction next week at Dreweatt’s Bristol salerooms (if I remember rightly, they’re the ones in the converted church right at the top of Clifton).

Seven lots of posters have come from the family of the artist Percy Drake Brookshaw. I’d never heard his name before, but this poster is very familiar.

That’s mainly because it has come round at specialist poster auctions a few times. It’s a good bit of 50s near-kitch, and so will probably go for rather more than the £60-80 estimate. And now I know who designed it, so that’s something.

If you follow the above link to the London Transport Museum, you will see that Brookshaw designed some rather wonderful pre-war images for them. Sadly, the posters that his family saved belong to his rather more whimsical post-war style, like this 1956 eulogy to Torquay.

The only other image which made me raise an eyebrow was the Post Office poster below.

That’s mainly because the more I look, the more of these ‘properly packed parcels please’ posters I discover. We’ve got four to start with (I don’t quite know why because they are giant 40″ x 30″ Quad Crowns and I don’t think we’ll ever have the wall space for them), and they’re unusually good bits of 60s design. I’ll blog about them properly one day.

6RP7324X32BP