How this man built a collection of vintage travel posters that could rival many museums
Geoffrey Weill’s collection is all laid out in his book All Abroad: A Memoir of Travel and Obsession, which chronicles his decades of journeys by cruise ship and train, car and plane.
Geoffrey Weill is a Londoner who has spent most of his life in New York, someone whose glamorous personal experiences of the golden age of travel seems to meld elements of Mad Men, Up in the Air and Catch Me If You Can.
They are all laid out in his book All Abroad: A Memoir of Travel and Obsession, which chronicles his decades of journeys by cruise ship and train, car and plane.
The 70-something-year-old – although his energy and joie de vivre belie the number – has led a life defined by travel like few others. It has also led to his collection of vintage travel posters that would rival many museums for their breadth, historical resonance, and beauty.
Sitting in what he defines in his book as drab, post-war London, Weill’s imagination was lit up by the National Geographic magazines that his aunt would send over from the US. But he wasn’t interested in the articles, so much as the adverts.
“They presented a London which looked so lovely but didn’t exist!” he said. “I fell in love with the context and the graphics, these glamorous images which were definitely showing the best of a destination.”
Fast forward to 1973 and, as a young man, Weill headed to New York aboard a steamer, The Canberra. It marked the start of a whole new life and also had an auspiciously remarkable meeting along the way.
“The Canberra was never the world's greatest ocean liner; it was being brought to New York do a series of cruises. The dining room was all Formica, Yorkshire pudding and brown Windsor Soup,” he said.
“But I met this girl and we went down to the disco. And there on the dancefloor…. was David Bowie. In my 73 years, I've probably never seen a more attractive man. He didn't dance, exactly, he kind of strutted on heels. He had this hedgehog, multicoloured hair and would just thump away to the music.”
Bowie was travelling on board The Canberra because he had a severe fear of flying, but that was never going to be an issue for Weill.
“The journey was really symbolic of my transferring my life from one side of the Atlantic to the other. Strange but sort of wonderful!” he continued.
Indeed, his ultimate destination in the Big Apple was the grand offices of Thomas Cook, the legendary travel agent which first opened way back in 1841. He was quickly promoted, something he puts down modestly to his accent. “There is still nothing more advantageous in New York, 50 years later, than having a British accent!” Weill said. “I was put in charge of the window displays that changed every two weeks. Different shipping companies or tourist offices would provide us with props, including posters, and I would work to set it all up.”
It would cement his love affair with travel art, in every form. But it wasn’t just posters he collected; he also amassed luggage labels. He recounts in his book – part autobiography, part travelogue – how they were his entry point. On one of many travels as a small boy with his parents, a hotel concierge came up to him in the lobby and carefully placed one of the hotel’s luggage labels on his suitcase.
“I was no longer a little boy with a cardboard box of Dinky cars – I was a traveller and it was incredibly meaningful,” he continued. “There was something so romantic about these images, the typeface, the way the destination was depicted on the labels. So, I began to collect them. I would take the tube to Piccadilly Circus and look in the airport and tourist board offices, go in and ask for posters and timetables. They were happy to give them out.”
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
“This one is from Japan, OSK Lines. It’s painted in such a way that it looks like it’s on silk. It’s really beautiful, but it’s also special because it’s big, 25 per cent bigger than the regular travel poster, which gives it a special gravitas. You also have to think about the time when this and these posters were produced. It was the 1930’s, the trains and boats back then looked so elegant, but the reality was that half the world was trying to escape on them as the world was falling apart.”
The ‘Netherlands Indian Government Railways’ was actually a private railway company in Java, in what was then The Dutch East Indies: “This hangs in our office, it’s 45 inches (114.3cm) by 25 inches. I love how it talks about ‘only’ taking 36 hours to travel from Singapore – and six days from Manilla – complete with 2 l's. This was one of the first posters that has photography, then graphics in black and orange.”
“Many of these posters are beautifully painted and the typefaces are often miraculously good. I certainly think they're up there, with some originals by Toulouse Lautrec. The oldest one I have is this one from 1890, a poster of Nice by Paris Lyon Mediterranee railroad. It hangs in our dining room. God, yes it’s art!”
New York Penn Railroad
“These posters weren’t made to be kept, but stuck up for a month, or even pasted on a column somewhere. That’s why so few, comparatively, have survived. In our living room at home we have five, including one of Penn Railroad to New York with the words New York in neon, from about 1948 - the skyline and the neon really shine.”
“This ship is the Liberte, formerly the German liner EUROPA, which France "inherited" after Second World War. This poster is by Paul Colin, a French artist who also designed artwork for the Folies Bergeres, Moulin Rouge and the Champs Elysees Theatre. He is possibly the most sought-after poster artist, other than Cassandre.”
American President Lines was founded in 1848 and are still going today, an American container shipping company known as APL: “They also have one of these posters at The Siam hotel in Bangkok. It has different colours in it, maybe it has faded over the years. Mine hasn’t, but theirs is kind of yellowy.”
Finally, to a Dutch poster for a Pullman train service linking Amsterdam and Brussels. It launched in December 1945 and was the first international train to run following the war. It had to detour through Nijmegen as destroyed bridges had yet to be repaired, meaning that it took eight hours instead of four. This was designed for Dutch Railways by Fedde Weidema, a Dutch painter and graphic designer. In his book, Weill talks lovingly about the attention to detail, the light – and most of all the ham sandwich and steaming cup of coffee which would have felt like pure luxury in austere post-war Europe.