Quad Royal

That’s Shell, that was

crownfolio — Fri, 17 May 2013 08:47:50 +0000

Look at this picture, which has just come up for sale on eBay. Now obviously no one is going to buy it, and not only because it’s on offer for the frankly ridiculous price of £23.61, but more importantly because it is being sold by people who butcher books and sell the plates. Ought to [...]

Miscellania

crownfolio — Mon, 13 May 2013 08:48:50 +0000

People keep sending me things. Which is wonderful, but does every so often necessitate a whole post to catch up with them. First off the blocks is ‘mm’, who chipped in after the recent discussion about Harry Stevens to point out these two film posters of his which have come up on eBay. I have [...]

Designer’s eye

crownfolio — Wed, 08 May 2013 11:18:17 +0000

So here I am submerged in house renovations when there are poster auctions which I need to tell you about. First in the line, mainly because it’s in just a few days time, is the forthcoming Swann Auction of Modernist Posters. Now, with their being in New York, there are usually only one or two [...]

Results

crownfolio — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 14:05:43 +0000

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 [...]

String Theory

crownfolio — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 18:49:40 +0000

This has recently arrived in the post, contradicting my previous assertion on here that there are no more eBay bargains to be had. Admittedly it is not an outstanding piece of graphic design history (although I quite like it) and is rather battered round the edges too. But it’s by Lander, which is always [...]

Special

crownfolio — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 15:46:30 +0000

I can resist anything except temptation. So this is the Barbara Jones picture which comes up on the BBC Your Paintings site. I wish it were my painting. But in fact it belongs to Exhall Grange Community College and Special School in the Midlands. I could quite easily go off on an entire digression about [...]

Diverted

crownfolio — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 16:29:12 +0000

The peculiar thing about writing on Quad Royal, or to be more precise, the delving about in pursuit of a subject that I do in advance of writing, is that I quite often find myself in a place I didn’t expect to be. Take today, for example. This was going to be a quick, simple, [...]

Peaceful charm

crownfolio — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 18:16:05 +0000

I’m not really supposed to be here at all, what with it being the Easter holidays and so on. But Great Central Railwayana have sent me the catalogue for their forthcoming auction, and guess what, it’s got posters in it. So I thought you might like to know. That said, I can’t quite work myself [...]

Carefree by coach

crownfolio — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 12:40:02 +0000

I haven’t done a good rummage through eBay for a while. There is a reason for this, other than simple idleness on my part, which is that there hasn’t been much of interest coming up for a while. But this has been going on for so long now that it’s probably time to consider the [...]

Popular, again

crownfolio — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 13:27:43 +0000

We’ve been beaten to it! For a while now, me and Serge and Tweed have been thinking that what the world needs is a complete re-staging of Barbara Jones‘ Black Eyes and Lemonade Exhibition, which was held at the Whitechapel Gallery as part of the Festival of Britain celebrations in 1951. I’ve written about the [...]