As for posters, today he estimates that his collection extends to about 250, with around 80 framed and hanging. Some are at home, but the majority deck the walls of Geoffrey Weill Associates, the award-winning travel public relations agency that he has run since 1995.
They make for the perfect backdrop, a reminder of a gentler and certainly more glamorous time in travel. While he continues to occasionally buy today, largely on eBay, in the 1970s, his opportunities to buy involved dealers: “There was a poster dealer on Columbus Avenue. In 1976, you didn’t go to Columbus Avenue after dark, but very slowly it began to go upmarket. Up on a mezzanine was a guy called Philip Williams, I would go and sit with him for hours. He had piles and piles of posters, he’d show them to me and I’d just say ‘Okay, I’ll have that one’.
They were never terribly expensive – there’s none that I really went bonkers over, I’ve never paid US$1,000 for a poster. I know some are certainly valuable today and would maybe be worth around US$4,000 (about S$5,460) each.”
Weill explains that he also swapped a number of posters over the years. One he loved – and clearly misses – was an SAS one from 1957: “I did a deal with The Chisholm Gallery on 8th Avenue. SAS is the only airline with the same logo from 70 years ago – they introduced it in the mid 1950’s. There’s a really nostalgic feel to it.”
He also explains how there was a particular potency to ‘escapist’ travel images in posters before the Second World War. Although he hasn’t found one to date, a poster of a German ship called the St Louis hides a remarkable story: “The St Louis was carrying 1000 German Jews to Cuba, in May 1939. The ship got to Cuba but they wouldn’t let them in. Then the US didn’t let them in. Eventually the ship went to Antwerp and France, Holland, the UK and Belgium each took a quarter of the passengers. The Brits were the only to survive, due to the holocaust.”
Among those in his collection are a number which carry special resonance:
Japan, OSK Lines
Source: CNA
