The new Beatbooks catalogue lines up the seminal alongside the obscure, from complete sets of Oz, Ink, Gandalf’s Garden and Suck magazines and Time’s “Swinging London” cover story to Robert E. Brown’s The Psychedelic Guide To Preparation Of The Eucharist, LIFE’s July 1969 study of US communes and a rare poster for the Psycho Circus at the Roundhouse in 1967 in support of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign.
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Beatbooks 61: Communal, alternative and psychedelic living; Peyote; Hippies; Music; Psychedelic & Underground Art; Sixties London; Underground Press
Talk at the V&A: 60s posters from Pop to Psychedelia
British Posters: Advertising Art & Activism
“People do love huge pieces of paper”.
So runs the quote heading up a section in V&A curator Catherine Flood’s excellent overview British Posters: Advertising Art & Activism, published by the museum to coincide with its multifarious design celebrations this Olympic year.
And it’s true. We do.
Or we all did, when this vital form was simultaneously a mass-medium and a highly personal communications device, when huge promotional budgets and lack of urban controls resulted in the accretive papering of our street-scapes. Meanwhile, behind closed doors, we gave posters pride of place on the walls of our bedrooms, bedsits and sitting rooms.

//Top left: Your Britain, Fight For It Now, Abram Games, 1942. Right: Keep Death Off The Road, Carelessness Kills, William Little, 1949.//
Chaumont show selection continues

//Holding foldout sleeve for the 1972 album Revelations: A Musical Anthology For The Glastonbury Fayre, designed by Barney Bubbles and released in 1972. Photo: Sophie Demay//
Artist/curator Sophie Demay and I are continuing to sort through potential materials for this summer’s exhibition White Noise, which Demay is creating with Etienne Hervy as part of this year’s International Poster & Graphic Design Festival in Chaumont, France.
See more images from the selection process on the Barney Bubbles blog.
Ian Dury With Love: Barney Bubbles back at the V&A
I sourced this incredible large-scale Barney Bubbles-designed poster from a private collection for the V&A’s forthcoming exhibition British Design: 1948-2012.
Chris Breward, co-curator with Ghislaine Wood, credits my 2010 exhibition Process (which focused on Bubbles’ working practices) for having persuaded the V&A to foreground the work of the late graphic designer in the new show.
Beatbooks 58: Psychedelia
Psychedelics – in the form of art, design, drugs, literature, music and the counter-culture – dominate the latest catalogue from BeatBooks.
Postcards: Moscoso+ Kagan for The Family Dog
This Family Dog postcard was a present for Victor Moscoso fan Mrs G a couple of years back.
Posters: The Heartbreakers at The Speakeasy (1977)
Thirty four years ago today The Heartbreakers played The Speakeasy.
The rock business haunt north of Oxford Circus had seen better times by this gig. I was taken by a member, a photographer at the agency where I worked. I remember being embarrassed by his long hair.
Posters: The withdrawn Carry On Cleo by Tom Chantrell (1964)
I bought this beauty at a second-hand bookshop at Willesden Green underground station in 1983.
I see from the pencil marking on the back it cost £2. Measuring 39″ x 20″, it turns out it is quite the rarity.
A personal loss and the rash of suicides among young gay individuals in the US has prompted the creation of a two-sided poster as the latest project by art collective 2-UP .
No More Suicides is a collaboration between Adam Shecter (who founded 2-UP last year with partner Joe Winter) and poet Matthea Harvey, who suffered the loss of a friend at their own hand.
“One side is fantasy; Matthea’s poem imagines a fox constellation that looks after kids, and I draw an imaginary mascot for a LGBT kids TV show,” says Shecter.











