I had started to write about The Last Fosca Gig and the rest of the Swedish trip, but it was one of those pieces that Could Not Be Stopped. So I’ll come back to that when I’ve whipped it into a less rambling shape. In the meantime, here’s something brilliant by other people.
There’s at least two articles in the papers this week about the success of that 1940s ‘Keep Calm And Carry On’ poster, intended for use in the event of a Nazi occupation of Britain.
I’ve had one for a while, after I saw it in a photo of the writer Sarah Waters’s home, then found it on sale in the V&A shop. I realise it’s rather ubiquitous now, but that doesn’t make the design any less lovely to look at. It’s still infinitely preferable to any more recent new-agey self-help equivalent: the genuine period style imbuing a useful sentiment with a wry stiff-upper-lip balance. I also think of Douglas Adams’s ‘Don’t Panic’ ‘written in large, friendly letters’ on the cover of that book within that book of his. The ‘Keep Calm’ font is more matronly than friendly, though; a kind of design equivalent of castor oil.
The success is particularly great for Stuart and Mary Manley, the couple who in 2000 discovered a rare instance of the original 40s poster in their second-hand bookshop at Alwick Station, Northumberland, and decided to print up a facsimile. Mary Manley writes about the full story of the poster on her own blog here, and explains why, no, she isn’t rich, actually. She also tried to track down the identity of the artist:
‘In my mind’s eye, I see him (and I think very probably, back then, it was a ‘he’), labouring away, paid tuppence, probably getting to and from work on his bike (remember: this was ’30s England) or else, if he lived in London, on the tube that would, itself, become soon enough a bomb shelter. Well, whoever it was, we’d so much like to know his name and give due credit.’
And I’d love to know what he’d make of his unused design’s belated, anachronistic success.
Here’s a recent article in the Guardian tying in the design’s popularity with the current recessionary mood. Ms Manley adds her own take on this:
‘What I most love… is how that little crown’s message – so simple, so clean, so without spin – has turned out to have meaning not just for a single people in time of trouble but for all of us wherever we live, whatever our troubles.’
There’s also been the inevitable arch parodies (‘PANIC AND RUN AWAY’), plus sightings in things like Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinay Gentlemen: Black Dossier.
But what I really want to pass on today is this wonderful, constructive and inspiring take by Matt Jones, which is currently doing the Internet rounds (click image for link):
Isn’t that wonderful? Particularly the spanners in the crown.Â
Tags: get excited and make things, keep calm and carry on
