Friday, December 24, 2010

Vintage European Posters


On Maui there is a wonderful little store which you should visit and dawdle in, if you are ever on that island. It's in Lahaina, on Front Street, facing the channel and Molokai.


Employees with gloved hands show you as many of their hundreds of thousands of vintage posters as you can stand. Many of them are by pretty famous artists, such as Capiello, and date from 1900 to the present. A giant wine-related poster from 1920, by a great artist, might set you back about $700. These are original prints, not reproductions. The variety and colors and skill are amazing. Many reveal a wonderful bit of whimsy.


I found a real treasure (OK, two): In 1905 some French chaps put together the Ampellographie, a seven-volume set of the world's best depiction of all the world's winegrapes, with lots of written information about each variety. This set includes many grapes that are now thought to be extinct. We think of animal extinction but how often do we consider plant extinction? Each set of books includes about 500 color plates and many more black and white ones. Each plate was stone-lithographed; the color plates were done by printing each color separately, in multiple printings. The process is so exacting that it took about seven years just to print enough for 250 sets of these books. Many of those sets were lost in World Wars 1 and 2; this store has a set which they'll sell to you for just $14,000. Another set is for sale online at another bookstore for $13,000. But this Maui store also found a partial set of volumes, and they stripped out the color plates, and sold each one for $400. Guess who came and bought almost all of them? California winery owners, of course, so as you taste through Napa and Sonoma, you might scan the walls for color grape prints--just look for "Ampellographie and 1905" on the print. By the time I got there, they had only three color plates left. I bought the best one of those--an obscure white grape, Gradiska. It's grown in Bessarabia, which is now called Mondovia, a tiny country in the former USSR which runs north-south and is bordered on the south by the Black Sea. It is the most amazing artistic quality you can imagine. The color printing is amazing.
The second treasure I found was a 1937 Damiani label created by the famous Italian artist Capiello. He drew a comely lass adorned with grapes, for a liqueur called Quinquina--it has a double shot of quinine in it and was made on Corsica. The border of the label is 10k gold! It is lovely.
They have SO many posters there that a nearby warehouse cannot hold them all. The employees are highly educated art history majors (in case you know any who might need a job using that knowledge). Allan Dickar is the owner. What a great business! I give it my very highest recommendation!

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