Thursday’s Design Auction at St Brides seemed to go pretty well. At least £5,000 was raised from about 85 lots for Lincoln’s degree show students, which will be split down the middle with the St Bride’s printing library itself, so all good news on the financial front.
Highlights of the evening? Probably watching Messrs Barnbrook and Pearson bidding against one another for a half page advert in Eye magazine (which eventually went for over £200, but that’s still a bargain).
Perhaps there were some signs of the credit crunch as most lots settled for £50 or less (unlike last year when several poster lots regularly got into the hundreds), but with the rise in competition for design auctions themselves, perhaps a lower figure was to be expected.
The creative group EATeacake sparked a bidding war between two clients, not perhaps for their goody bag of treats (shown above) but their offer of free creative serves on a project brief, to the highest bidder.
Johnson banks managed to bid successfully for a few things ourselves: this lovely reprint of Bruce Rogers’ 1949 Centaur Types, and a signed Laurence Weiner poster.
Highlight of our evening was probably managing to sneakily bid from the back for this lovely little Adana tabletop printing press. How nice is that?
We’ll be taking orders for invitation cards just as soon as we’ve worked out how to use it. Roll on next year.
Johnson banks’ creative director Michael Johnson at the podium, guest auctioneer for the evening. Image by Julian Anderson, and there are more images on the Eye magazine blog, here.