Shrewsbury

Scanning an old calender of railway posters recently, the one featuring Shrewsbury looked strangely familiar. As it turned out, I had an early 1970s guide book with the same illustration on the cover, although I suspect that the original was done in the 1950s. The artist was Jack Merriott (1901-68), a landscape and portrait painter in both oil and watercolour.

Three little Jems

Eva Meyer, Jayne Mansfield and Lili St Cyer, from Jem magazine, November 1956.

Claude Seere

Another jumble sale, another blog. I picked up a copy of The Car, a book of, often quite dark, cartoons on motoring, very much from a French perspective. This was an English edition from 1984, featuring the work of the excellent Claude Seere. Born in 1938, he died, ironically, in a road accident in 1998.

Ava Norring

Born in Hungary in 1929, Ava Norring moved to the USA following her first marriage in 1948. Despite being dubbed "20th Century Fox's Hungarian answer to Zsa Zsa Gabor", her only credited film appears to have been as Beatrice in The Snows of Kilimanjaro. These pictures are part of a spread by Robert Halmi from the June 1955 issue of Esquire magazine; the advert for the film appeared in the December 1952 issue of Photoplay.

Ionicus in the Dales

A while ago, I bought from eBay a run of issues of The Dalesman, a magazine devoted to life in the Yorkshire Dales and surrounding area. I had hoped for a nice selection of advertisements and was not disappointed (see the Brown, Muff's posting, for instance). A bonus were the illustrations on the cover, a humorous take on the month in question. These are credited to "Ionicus", who, thanks to wonders of Google, I now know as Joshua Armitage (1913-98). A regular in Punch, he was also well-known for his PG Wodehouse covers for Penguin, one of which I have added to the end of these Dalesman covers from 1969. Note that the price increased by sixpence from the April edition.......

And finally......................