MINNEAPOLIS – Twin Cities auction house Pashco Posters announces their Oct. 18 auction of historical photography books and vintage rock ’n’ roll memorabilia, capped off by multiple rare and vintage items. LiveAuctioneers.com will provide absentee and Internet bidding.
The auction features an amazing collection of vintage and rare rock posters, capped off by a rare, signed Skolnick Woodstock “no-black plate” poster that is expected to bid well into the thousands.
Auction house owner Paul “Pash” Pashbin discovered the collection of vintage rock posters – from Family Dog, to Easy Rider, to Jefferson Airplane and Frank Zappa – in the basement of an antique shop. He said most of them are in mint condition, as perfect as the day they were silkscreened.
Included are many Pandora Productions hippy / psychedelic posters from the 1960s, including “Love Is a Flower” and one of the rarest Beatles posters in existence. The Beatles poster came about when in 1969, an unmarked envelope showed up in Pandora Productions mailbox. It contained a photograph of the Beatles taken near the River Thames. The team at Pandora decided to create a poster from it and the rest is history. Not many of these were made available, and Pashco Poster purchased the remaining lot – the last of the items in the Pandora Collection. These posters defined the age of Aquarius and the summer of love and are in amazing condition for being 45-plus years old.
Many other rare and vintage posters and ephemera including Fillmore and Avalon Family Dog posters, and vintage blacklight posters will go on the block.
The auction is topped of by two rare items. The first is an original signed Woodstock no-black plate poster (below). According to the artist Arnold Skolnick, because of the continually changing band lineup for the Woodstock festival, Rappaport Press printed the posters without the black plate, which could be quickly added later. The resulting graphic, stripped down to only the hand, guitar neck, bird and famous tag line, illustrates the dramatic branding impact of Skolnick’s iconic design. The second is a 1969 Oval poster by Jay Hines of Pandora Productions, an experimental poster that was never produced for the public.
The books cover fine-art photography from the 20th century by the likes of Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Peter Beard, Walker Evans, Robert Frank and Lee Friedlander, some of them signedIn addition are runs of important periodicals such as Aperture. The auction includes small, moderately priced items and major collector books. In recent years the Photo Book has become increasingly researched and collected.
For more information email Poster Pash at posterpash@gmail.com.
