Is there a worthwhile market for block mounted items in these days?

[Not your average framer]

I have about 20,000 prints for the 1920, and 1930's some are locally painted scenes by R D Sherrin while other are mostly prints by Margaret Dovenston with Dickensian era scene of Inns and stage coaches. They are all 7" x 9" and good quality printing on to fairly thin paper. I've a fair amount of different thicknesses of MDF to block mount then on to. I'm thinking of making a few to try in the shop windows.

They tell me that Devon is becoming quite popular with the tourists again, so maybe some interesting block mounted tourist related prints might be able to sell if the price is right. Materials wise I already have everything that I would need to do this and would not need to spend any money to do this, but I am wondering if the era of bock mounted prints is already long pasted.

Any thoughts?

[vintage frames]

Hi Mark. As you know these prints are no longer fashionable on their own. I very much doubt block mounting them would help any sale.
What would be fashionable and ensure a response would be to put them into very old and wrecked antique frames. They have to be genuine antiques but of rubbish value - car boot and auctions. Absolutely no repro! If it's gilded, give it a good cold water wash but don't attempt any repairs. If it's a wood frame, keep as is. No waxing. If you need a mount - something well foxed and acidic is best.The more wrecked the better.
I think you might be surprised.

[prospero]

I cut my teeth, so to speak, on old frames. A local antique dealer used to buy up stuff at sales and bring me carloads.
He would bring a lot of old prints (Illustrated London News and the like). He wanted so-and-so picture in so-and-so frame.
It wasn't exactly lucrative for me but I learned a lot. Often the frames were olde oak ones with long-forgotten family photos.
He had zero interest in these but I used to save them.

This one was particularly interesting and poignant. In WWI most of the fallen were not shipped home unless you were rich.
But you could get a photo of the headstone in a foreign field.

[Not your average framer]

Hi Dermot,

Getting old a wrecked frames around here is kind of hard. Since the lockdown there have not been any car boot sales and charity shop just chuck anything that does not look new. Since the local Charity shops know that I'm interested in older frames, they get a bit suspicious if I so much as even look at a picture frame and it's withdrawn from sale to be valued. Iused to have a box full of old picture frames that I keeked for reference purpose, but since the move of premises, I don't know what happed to them.

Lots of people who live in up market areas and have second homes near me, buy old pictures in places like Camden market and come to me to get old looking frames for old pictures which they bring down with them, when they visit their second homes. I've probably snapped a good prortion of what available old frames that were floating around in the local area and cut them down to fit customers artworks. These days I have to produce my own old frames to suit customers needs.

I'm pretty good at making gubby looking distressed old style pine frames. I've been doing these for years and they are all over the local area in little cottages and places like that. I'm still thinking that some of these prints might have some sort of appeal. I've got prints of Torbay, before lots of the houses got built and spoiled the seaside views. Before I got into framing, I run a second had book ond print shop, I used to sell loads of this stuff then. A lot of older visitor used to buy this stuff like crazy then and I'm kind of wondering ik the appeal died with the generation that's no longer around, or not.

Unfortunately, all this stuff has been in storage since 2004 and only turned up when my mother house was being cleared after she died, so I have only had then back a couple of years ago. I had not been able to do anything with them since because I been recovering from my stroke, so this is the first chance to see if they will still sell. I was not really wanting to properly frame these, because I don't think that there is that sort of money to be made from them. There are tourist wandering around the town now, but there's no a lot of money being spent yet. Hopefully people will start spending again soon.

[Not your average framer]

Hi Peter,

That's that's very true. Those that fell overseas were mostly buried overseas. That's how we got the Cenotaph in London. The word Cenotaph is a greek word meaning empty tomb,