Fab and Gear! Dances for Mods and Rockers: A Panther Pictorial from 1964

It sold within hours of being put up on eBay, but it's still worth sharing the photos of this wonderful, ephemeral bit of cash-in fun. Some of the photos are from the set of Ready Steady Go! and the dance instructions look a bit complicated to me, but hey, it's a thing from another time...

Ever Heard Of Hans Erni?

I'd never heard of Hans Erni, but his art for the book Man in Society: Patterns of Human Orginization (MacDonald, 1964) really caught my eye when a copy came across my desk the other week. Shades of Picasso, Dali, and (to use a latter-day example) Dave McKean, but still very much his own.

You can learn more about the prolific Erni on his Wikipedia page. He died in 2015, at the rather impressive age of 106!

Here's his contribution to Man in Society.

How To Make A Good Cup of Tea, 1878 Style

Here's a recent addition to the shelves of the Little Shop: Vol. 1 No. 1 of the marvellously titled The Caterer and Refreshment Contractors Gazette from 1878.  

It features some wonderful old advertisements (I want a Beer Engine!), and an article that deserves to be reprinted in full: 'How to Make a Good Cup of Tea.'

Its second sentence is a basic statement of fact that, even 138 years later, is still far from being grasped by our American cousins...

"Tea cannot be made properly with water not heated up to boiling point."

The last paragraph also has some stern words for people who sweeten their tea "too freely"...

They've Invented a Video Game By Mistake!

This arrived in my in-box this morning: a fun 'what if?' from the chaps at Liberty Games. You can see more movie-tie-in-video-games-that-never-were here.

It Was 30 Years Ago Today... Withnail's Anniversary!

Exactly 30 years ago today, on August 3rd, 1986, a first time director, his crew and a few actors (not from London: one was and is a scouser, and the other grew up in Swaziland) gathered at Sleddale Hall near Shap in Cumbria, and rolled cameras for the first day's shooting of a little film called Withnail and I. The rest is history...

The Cumberland News, one of the local papers here in Penrith (Penrith!!) has done a great commemorative article, which you can read below...

Having been alerted to the anniversary, I checked in with REG himself to see if he had any plans. While he didn't reply as such (not as of this writing, at least) he did like my tweet, which in these parts is the equivalent of a benediction from the pope...

Withnail & Prints

Limited edition prints and 'alternative' posters inspired by cult films have become quite the in-thing in recent years. The quick-sellouts and crazy secondary market prices for pretty much anything Mondo puts out has encouraged lots of similar enterprises on both sides of the Atlantic.

This summer, Print Club London has produced a slew of film-related work by various artists, and Withnail & I is represented in this print by the artist RYCA. I'm not sure what's going on with Withnail's mouth in the image, but the overall effect is rather good, with shades of Warhol's Elvis (to my untrained artistic eye, at least).

The print is 500 x 700mm, and limited to 200 copies signed by the artist, at £50 each. Not cheap, but very much the lower end of the going rate for such things. You can order a copy here.

Here's another, even more limited edition print, which I wish you could still order a copy of, as I'd love to have one, but alas the 50 produced all sold out in seconds a few years back (though copies have popped up on eBay since...). It's a typically witty idea by Olly Moss, the British artist who's a bit of a superstar in the world of Mondo prints and their ilk, thanks to his rapidly-becoming-iconic Star Wars posters, among many others. His Withnail image is simple, but brilliant...

Olly's work is all over eBay, but be prepared to pay decent money for the real McCoy - beware the pirated prints and posters! A slightly more affordable way to enjoy his stuff is to buy a copy of his first (and to date, only) book, Silhouettes From Popular Culture which I think is brilliant, but then I would, as with my Book Editor hat on, I was involved in bringing it into print.