Quad Royal

Krol to be kind

crownfolio — Thu, 17 May 2012 09:44:50 +0000

We bought this quite a while ago, but only recently got round to photographing it. It’s by Stan Krol, and thanks to the BMPA and their lovely online catalogue I can tell you that it’s from March 1966. A date that slightly surprised me as I would have had it down as late 1950s had [...]

D I Y Barbara Jones

crownfolio — Mon, 14 May 2012 13:12:47 +0000

Barbara Jones is becoming increasingly collectable. At least that’s the message I’m getting from eBay. We recently watched a whole collection of BBC schools booklets go past; most went for one or two pounds if they sold at all. The one exception was this. By Barbara Jones, it sold for £21.50. All of which preamble [...]

Beware of the Swarf

crownfolio — Thu, 10 May 2012 13:33:22 +0000

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 [...]

The book of the website

crownfolio — Tue, 08 May 2012 11:16:15 +0000

Well, nearly. But I have written a book, for the very lovely Shire Publications, about World War Two Home Front posters, and my preview copy arrived in the post just before the weekend. Should you wish, you can pre-order it on Amazon right now. Which of course you would very much want to do because [...]

The People Bring Much More Than Enough For The Service Of The Work

crownfolio — Fri, 04 May 2012 09:40:16 +0000

I’m back with the Empire Marketing Board posters once again. In particular this one, which neatly encapsulates the problem of Empire in a single image. I rather doubt that it was intended to give exactly that message; nonetheless it is rather brilliant. This treat comes from a wholly new archive of Empire Marketing Board output [...]

Cheap and Expensive

crownfolio — Thu, 03 May 2012 11:37:41 +0000

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 [...]

Superlative, he says

crownfolio — Wed, 02 May 2012 11:40:20 +0000

Watch out, there are auctions about. Admittedly not the poster extravaganzas which are Christies and Van Sabben, but auctions nonetheless. First under the microscope is GWRA in Leamington on May 19th. This is a railwayana auction which means that there is an awful lot of this kind of thing. Chris Watkiss, 1952 Along with even [...]

Paris by Moonlight

crownfolio — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 10:06:09 +0000

Apologies for not posting on Friday, but I got rather absorbed in back-office stuff here at the blog and then suddenly the day was gone. All of which means that the auction in which this appeared has now been and gone as well. But it’s worth taking a look at anyway, because it’s a slightly [...]

On the buses

crownfolio — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 12:10:44 +0000

Last week, Mr Crownfolio and I scored that increasingly rare thing, a bargain on eBay. Although this did involve us chancing a reasonably large sum of money on what was described as a lot of old railway posters that i got when i was turning out my grandparents old house they are at a ruff [...]

Give that penguin a fish!

crownfolio — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 13:54:22 +0000

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 [...]