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."
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