Thirty years ago, in 1996, my name first appeared on the Swann Galleries masthead as director of the Vintage Posters department. At the time I had been working at Swann for several years doing a variety of jobs, but had already identified my true area of interest—posters.

Bright, bold, colorful, well-designed, artistic, historical, sometimes amusing, sometimes powerful, always something new—as a student of history, I found them irresistible, and for thirty years I have made them an inseparable part of not only my professional career but also my identity.

Since I have been involved in the field I have been privileged to handle some of the world’s rarest and most exceptional images. But the part of the industry that appeals to me most is that I am still encountering images that I have never seen before.

The poster market is young compared to Swann’s other major areas of collecting (book, print and fine art collecting have been established for centuries) whereas poster collecting, which began in earnest in the 1890s, is relatively new by comparison.

As such it is still possible to be a trailblazer in the field, and it is this exciting intellectual aspect along with the accompanying thrill of discovery, the artistic revelations, and the graphic surprises that keep me eager to come to work every day, year in and year out. They keep me traveling around the country with Antiques Roadshow every summer, curating exhibitions throughout the years in museums (lately in New York City, but also in Prague, and Cedar Rapids, Iowa), writing articles and publishing books. But it is not coming across these unexpected gems alone that brings me such joy—it is bringing them into the public sphere and introducing them to the wider collecting world that really makes this pursuit worthwhile and satisfying.

A perfect example of this was creating a special auction every year to focus on travel posters, which we did for the first time in 1999. Until then they had been an overlooked and under-appreciated aspect of the poster market and are now avidly sought after by collectors and institutions alike.

All of this experience and exposure have given me a unique perspective on the poster world. An esoteric knowledge, to be sure, but within a field I care deeply about. Such are these “poster goggles,” forged from my keen, experienced, passionate, and in-depth, decades-long overview of the market  that when a single owner auction of vintage posters comes along that is as rarefied and wonderful as the Gooding Family Collection of Posters, it brings a twinge of pride and achievement to my heart, both personally and professionally.

A number of posters in our upcoming single-owner sale of Highlights from the Gooding Family Collection of Posters are discoveries, others haven’t been on the market for many, many years, and some are so scarce that while I am fully aware of their existence through having seen them in books, I have never had the privilege of handling them myself.
More and more auction houses are turning away from their legacy employees and bringing on inexperienced, AI-inspired choices to run their businesses. I am sure that works well for some of them. But for me, for Swann, I think that thirty years provides an invaluable perspective from which to run, relish and enjoy the auction world.

Resolutely Yours,

Nicholas D. Lowry,
President