Arjan den Boer

There's a special magic in railway posters that other advertisements rarely seem to have — maybe it's because they are so often promoting travel, adventure, and far-away places (or at least cheap tickets to the seaside), or maybe it's because of the circumstances in which we look at them. But whatever the reason, railway posters do very often seem to be memorable images that call up all sorts of pleasant associations when we see them again, even if they are from 150 years ago...

Arjan den Boer takes us through the history of (graphic) advertising on Dutch railways, looking in turn at the different purposes that posters were used for, and their evolution from dense tables of information to evocative (and often quite abstract) artworks designed to be taken in at a glance. Every artist mentioned in the book also gets an entry in a separate biographical section at the end.

There isn't very much in the book about the production processes used for the posters, or about the way railway companies deployed them and evaluated their effectiveness, although we do sometimes hear about posters that were considered too controversial in one way or another.

Railways have a lot of walls to cover, and those walls are seen by a great many people in the course of a day, so when they commission artwork for their advertisements they can afford to go for the best. There are quite a few unexpected names here — the famous marine painter H W Mesdag was commissioned by the Holland Railway to create posters advertising the ferry service from Harwich to Hoek van Holland; the architect H P Berlage did another (less successful) poster for Harwich-Hoek, as well as a very architectural design advertising the North Holland Tramway Company. The artwork of illustrator Dick Bruna (famous for Nijntje/Miffy) was also very present on stations, albeit in his case advertising on behalf of the Bruna family firm, which owned an important station-bookstall concession and published a popular series of paperback books. Sadly, Piet Mondriaan never seems to have designed a railway poster, but he has certainly inspired quite a few. Most posters, of course, were and are designed by specialist commercial artists, but there also seems to have been a steady trickle of railway employees who produced artwork in their spare time.

This is a big, glossy book, published to coincide with an exhibition at the Dutch Railway Museum in Utrecht. It contains reproductions, large and small, of dozens of railway posters, many of them from Arjan den Boer's personal collection, and all very clearly and sharply reproduced.… (altro)