Supplementary History: Regulation of Posters



 The Rise of Posters and their Regulation

    As early as the seventeenth century bills publicizing theatrical events and other announcements were stuck to posts marking pedestrian paths through the London streets: from the "posting of bills" came the word "billposting," carried out by "billstickers" or "billposters"; hence "poster," the first OED reference coming in Nicholas Nickleby in 1838, though doubtless the word was current much earlier. In 1895 Alexandre Arsène, writing of French posters, notes that "The poster-mania is a comparatively new disease" and then exemplifies the malady by discussing the difficulty of peeling especially fine specimens off the wall.(1) In the interim, the phrase the "horrors of the hoardings" had become a cliché, and in England the National Vigilance Society worried over the threat to public decency and the dangers of miseducation posed by outdoor advertisements.(2) Marie Kendall, "charming soubrette" (and like Bloom's recruiting poster, another Joycean invention), typifies the kind of siren that drew the Vigilance Society's anxious gaze. (In "Sirens," underscoring the ambivalent fascination of mass-produced femininity, Joyce inscribes the classical prototype into a poster for cigarettes, "a swaying mermaid smoking mid nice waves" [11.300].) With billposting completely unregulated, posters and notices were plastered anywhere they would stick, and the public began to complain about their unsightliness. As billsticking evolved from small-scale enterprises into capital intensive operations, newspapers felt threatened by potential revenue losses and, joining forces with those who opposed posters on ethical and aesthetic grounds, pressed for regulation. In response, rival organizations -- each with its own monthly journal, The Billposter and Advertising Agent (1886-89) and The Billposters' Journal and Lessee and Entertainers' Advertiser (1887-89) -- merged in The United Billposters' Association, with a new trade journal called simply The Billposter (1889-1920). Despite such heroic commercial solidarity, the government began to regulate the new industry in 1889 with the Advertising Stations Rating Bill, which empowered local authorities to tax advertisers for the use of buildings, vacant land, and areas near public roadways.(3)


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Posters Become Art

    In England Fred Walker's famous design for Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1860), later used in a poster for the stage adaptation (1871), is often credited with having stimulated the increasingly "aesthetic" advertisements that culminated in Aubrey Beardsley's designs for The Yellow Book. In 1895 the Chap-Book, an American avant-garde literary magazine modeled on The Yellow Book, notes of a particular item that "For the benefit of Poster Collectors a special edition of fifty copies has been printed on Japan paper," and the Pall Mall Gazette takes notice of "An exquisitely clever and amusing design, that would take the blue ribbon, judged by the points of artistic poster-making." A year later the Daily News announces an exhibition of "Portraits of some of the leading poster artists, with selections from their works." Ten years later, with the poster artistes themselves having been deemed as worthy of exhibition as their work, the growing influence of poster art registers in The Athenaeum, which complains that some of "our own painters" seem "somewhat abrupt and posterlike."(4) It should not be surprising, then, to discover that in 1920, only five years before directing The Battleship Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein, pioneer in the theory and practice of cinematic montage, was a poster artist for the Red Army.(5)

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Posters and the Gaze of the Novelist
 
    "A poster of a woman in tights herald[ing] the Christmas pantomime" induces Margaret Schlegel to wonder in Howards End (1910), "How many of these vacillating shoppers and tired shop-assistants realized that it was a divine event that drew them together?" Resisting the urban scene Joyce takes as his subject, Forster constructs an idealized pastoral retreat into which Margaret and her fellow shopper Mrs. Wilcox, pursued by a vision of a "torrent of coins and toys" issuing "from a forgotten manger," try to escape. More welcoming, the Vorticist typography of Wyndham Lewis's Blast (1914) suggests a poster influence, as does the typographic play of Italian Futurism. By 1918 a character in Lewis's Tarr, Kreisler, could loom in another's "distended eyes" as "a great terrifying poster." That the terrified character here, Bertha, has just been raped by Kreisler, a painter, anticipates in Lewis's characteristically violent fashion Sontag's insight into the "visually aggressive" nature of the poster image: "a poster reaches out to grab those who might otherwise pass it by."(6) A contemporary novel about shell-shock, Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier (1918), even appears to narratize a famous English recruiting poster in which a little boy and two women, one fair (Kitty), the other dark (Jenny), watch from the threshold of a comfortable house (Baldry Court) as soldiers (joined by Chris Baldry) march off to war: "Women of Britain Say 'GO!'" And in the wake of Ulysses's self-conscious engagement with the discourse of advertising, Charles Tansley's imagined oneness with Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse (1927) is disrupted when she suddenly cranes forward to read a circus poster being pasted up by a one-armed man.


 
 
 

Notes
 

1. Alexandre Arsène and others, The Modern Poster (New York: Scribners, 1895), 23, 24. The OED first records "postermaniac," "one who has a mania for collecting posters," in 1895.

2. David Allen, Allens: The History of a Family Firm, 1857-1957 (London: John Murray, 1957), 137. Allen includes a useful chapter on billsticking during World War I.

3. Ibid., 134-37.
 
4. These examples are culled from the OED.

5. See Marie Seton, Sergei M. Eisenstein (New York: A. A. Wyn, 1952), 37.
 
6. Sontag, "Posters," vii. She also notes on the same page that the force of the poster partly derives from its "form," which "depends on the fact that many posters exist -- competing with (and sometimes reinforcing) each other."