Toronto, Canada

Two years ago, I had posted about an El Lissitzky poster I’ve had hanging in my home for the past few decades—one of several dozen given to me by the curator of the magnificent Poster Collection at the Kunstgewerbemuseum (Museum of Applied Arts) in Zürich when I visited there in 1986—I’d been surprised to stumble across the original photo-montage prep the famous Russian Constructivist had used in preparing the dramatic poster.

A week ago, I was delighted to hear from Adell Shneer, a Toronto-based food stylist and now Senior Food Specialist at Canadian Living magazine who had come across my earlier post in a quest for more information about twenty or so large-sized posters she had re-discovered (rolled up in a tube and forgotten in the basement of her home). Adell studied graphic design at York University in the early 1980s and then at the London College of Printing (a diploma in Advanced Typographic Design), and in an experience similar to my own, had been given a variety of posters by the congenial old curator of the Kunstgewerbemuseum Zürich’s poster collection when she visited there. It was a reunion with former design classmates last week that spurred Adell to hunt for the posters she still had somewhere in her basement…

Adell is interested in establishing a value for these posters (they’re in excellent condition), though she’s not sure she actually wants to part with them—she has also considered donating them to a museum. I’m curious as well, as I still have six of these same posters (shown above) in my collection. I put Adell in touch with friend Rene Wanner (who offers comprehensive advice and information about poster collecting on his exhaustive website here), and offered to post some thumbnail images on this blog [√]. I invite anyone who’s interested in these posters to contact me—I’ll gladly pass your query or information on to Adell.

Please forgive the poor quality of the images shown above—Adell photographed the oversize posters with a point-and-shoot digital camera while standing on a chair and sent them to me for informational purposes… ergo the image foreshortening, inaccurate edge trim, distorted aspect ratio, variable focus, and dodgy colour fidelity—the original DIN A0 posters are truly spectacular (each is 841mm x 1189mm, or 33.1″ x 46.8″).