Available in California: A Trove of SoCal Racing Posters

I was contacted last week by an antiques dealer in Southern California that acquired these marvelous Southern California road racing posters from the estate of California Sports Car Club racer Noble Bishop. Bishop raced at these events in Crosleys and Triumphs and has kept these mementos in fantastic shape.

• 

• 

• 

A couple of these are posters that I’ve never seen before and they are just heartbreakingly lovely. There’s a stark simplicity in these earlier generations of posters and handbills that is left lacking in most modern racing ephemera. The cheap availability of full color photographic printing is part of the problem. After all, why bother investing the time and creativity in something when we can just print up a photo?

Good design requires constraints: constraints of budget, of technology, of time. The more we strip those constraints away, there more contemporary racing poster design seems to suffer. Even the events that take the time to hire good designers and artists to craft a program or poster usually end up cluttering it with sponsoring logos. Thankfully, these posters lack most of that clutter. They’re fantastic. Unfortunately, they’re a bit out of my price range otherwise I would have bought them already instead of sharing them here with you. Contact the Blue Heron Gallery in Fallbrook, CA for more information.