by Not your average framer » Mon Sep 10, 2018 8:37 am
I used to run a secondhand bookshop, which also sold antique prints and vintage adverts. The biggest sellers where the vintage adverts and they had to be certain types of adverts, not just anything you can lay your hands on. The adverts needed to be a decent size as well.
The nostalgia thing was good in those days, people bought old car adverts mainly one that reminded them of older cars that they once owned, Guinness adverts (not later than the mid 1960's) and older Coca Cola adverts (again not later than the mid 1960's).
Old Coca Cola adverts came from the back covers of National Geographic magazines which had a Coca Cola advert every other issue, but even then only particular adverts sold. Guinness adverts came from the 1950's and 1960's illustrated London news, the Shpere, the Graphic, the field, the Tattler and stuff like that.
Illustrations from books are more difficult, you do need to know which ones are considered collectible, Forget modern books, it all about older books, some older childrens books are still sought after as prints, but you are looking for early and collected illustrators, some engraved prints will sell, but again they need to be the sought after ones.
I still have a large quanity of old prints and victorian wood cut engravings, which I never got rid of, but the era of old print shop is long gone. BTW, there are copyright issues taking prints out of books as many of these prints were produced as works of art as well and the publishers permission was not given to sell the book illustrations as prints.
Most prints from books are quite small and that's not always what people want these days. You see a lot of this sort of thing on Ebay these days and the price that people expect to pay for this sort of thing is almost nothing. Some old secondhand bookshops can still get away with this sort of thing, but you see this stuff in charity shops for peanuts and even then they won't sell.
Older Christopher Robin and Pooh Bear still sell once in a while for young childrens bedrooms, but you are not talking about particularly worthwhile prices, usually it a way of adding some extra valve to a ready made frame. You still see stuff like this in the odd junk shop, but that's about it. Nostalgia ain't what it used to be and this stuff now sells mostly on car boot sales for next to nothing.
Mark Lacey
“Life is short. Art long. Opportunity is fleeting. Experience treacherous. Judgement difficult.”
― Geoffrey Chaucer