New Pre Christmas Additions November 2022

Apologies again for failing to add a blog in October, there is too little time and too many new posters to add! Actually I was in South Africa for a few weeks and away from the office.

But I am back with a bang as I have uploaded 300 new items which accounts for the planned uploads for October, November and December, meaning that I have completed the plan for 100 new items uploaded per month in 2022.There are already new items waiting to be listed in 2023. but I am looking to have three or four updates next year rather than it being monthly.

The past few months have been fantastic and the improved visibility that the new Shopify store allows us, plus the Google channel,  has brought in lots of new customers.

We are currently experiencing a couple of ongoing issues. Firstly there is a supply issue for our regular paper stock. A1, A2 and A4 prints are not affected, however, it is currently impossible to source the A3 Xerox silk finished A3 paper that we have used for ten years. As a result we are having to use Color Copy 200gsm paper, which is fine, but is not as superior as the Xerox paper. We will return to the Xerox paper as soon as it becomes available.

The second issue are the ongoing Royal Mail Strikes which have caused unacceptable delays in delivery. We have tried to avert this by using Evri, however this has resulted in one in ten items being destroyed by the courier and multiple replacements being sent out via Royal Mail. We have no option but to drop Evri as their service is unacceptable. We will now be using the slightly more expensive Royal Mail Tracked 48, which may not get delivered in 48 hours, but is trackable and seems to arrive in one piece.

Enough of the boring bits. Here are our latest highlights:-

1. I was fortunate enough to be in Seville in May for this years Feria. We have uploaded numerous beautiful Spanish fiesta posters from all over Andalucia and dating from the 1920's to the 1960's.

2. This is a beautiful Great Western Railway poster for Chepstow Races. I hope the people who went to this meeting had more luck than I did, when I attempted to go racing at Chepstow in 2019 and it was abandoned due to wet weather.

3. What could be more terrifying than a Terminator. A Terminator speaking Hungarian. Visszajövök (I'll be back in magyar)

4. I like an adventure on my holidays and what could be more of an adrenalin rush than a few weeks in Soviet Stalingrad. Tourism took a bit of a hit in the 1940's and to be honest never really recovered.

5. Another Horse Racing Poster but this one is for Lahore in Modern day Pakistan. This poster, dating to the days of the Raj and prior to partition with India, sums up the days of Empire perfectly.

6. When I first came across this poster I had presumed that it was produced to promote the Beatles recording of the same name. However, on closer inspection, there is a Shell Petroleum logo in the bottom corner and as a result it is one of the cooler advertisements for the oil industry I have ever come across. Not sure whether John, Paul, George and Ringo had much in common with Shell, but who knew? Petrol was cool in the sixties.

7. There are plenty of Soviet posters of Lenin and Stralin. Even Khruschev and Gorbachev have their fair share of communist propaganda posters with their faces on. Desite being Soviet President for many years, Leonid Brezhnev, rarely apperared on posters. Ot was probably down to those eyebrows. Scary.

8. Couldn't resist listing this one and will be quite surprised if anyone actually buys it. I remember the day vividly and going for a celebratory drink in Charing Cross Road in London when we were rid of her. Now, being much older, I realize that she really wasn't as bad as all that, especially when compared to those that followed her.