If, like me, you dream of finding a hoard of railway posters languishing forgotten in a disused attic, the following blog post may prove too much to bear. For that is exactly what happened earlier this year when a lady contacted me out of the blue to say that she...

A fashion-conscious visitor to the Swinging London of the late 1960s could hardly have missed the achingly cool ad campaigns for leading women’s shoe retailer T. Elliot & Sons. From giant billboards to ‘car cards’ in Tube trains, trendy graphics and innovative product photography helped establish the brand as the...

Salford to London   Tom Eckersley (top) and Eric Lombers  In 1934 two aspiring Lancashire designers arrived in London at the start of a creative partnership that was to help transform commercial art in Britain. Tom Eckersley (1914-1997) and George Eric Lombers (1914-1978) had studied together at Salford Art School...

In the years after the Second World War commercial art in Britain was booming. A new generation of designers and illustrators brought a cheery, optimistic, aesthetic to advertising that saw its greatest expression in the posters and publicity of progressive commissioners, such as the General Post Office (GPO), London Transport...

Its amazing what you can find when you're looking for something else. Last summer I was in New York searching for vintage posters, when a dealer showed me three original commercial artworks by poster legend Edward McKnight Kauffer (1890 – 1954). Executed in gouache paint, and signed/dated on the front and...

The unprecedented expansion of London’s suburban hinterland in the 1920s and 30s required a new type of publicity to sell the homes and lifestyles on offer. In London Transport Posters. A Century of Art & Design (2008), I wrote about the methods used by London Underground to market the emerging...

  One of the joys of being a poster dealer it that you never know what’s going to turn up next. Hours spent scouring auctions or following up leads might result in one or two ‘new’ posters to add to the list, or a small collection of miscellaneous material. Such...

Book Review A lot has been written about the poster designer Abram Games (1914-1996), including his own account of his working methods (Over My Shoulder, 1960) and an excellent biography by his daughter, Naomi (Abram Games, Graphic Designer: Maximum Meaning, Minimum Means, 2003). Justly regarded as one of Britain’s greatest...

To celebrate the 80th birthday of the nation's favorite comic, Twentieth Century Posters is delighted to publish an illustrated history of the Beano, supplied by DC Thompson: