The Rest is History Titanic Series - A Reminder of Titanic Posters

I’m a huge fan of The Rest Is History Podcast by Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland. It’s one of the smash-hit podcasts in “The Rest Is…” series of podcasts produced by Goalhanger which is Gary Lineker’s wildly successful podcast production company.

Their Titanic series spanned six wonderful episodes and featured their usual trademark approach which is full of detail, colour, incredible research and a good helping of (dark) humour.  

It also reminded me of my early days starting out with The Canvas Works in our Kinsale gallery. When I first opened the gallery in 2012 I knew I wanted to do something around retro style travel posters.  I’d worked in advertising agencies and had developed an interest in the railway travel posters of Ireland and the UK from the 1930’s and 1940s.

This was a fascinating period of creativity and innovation in advertising - combining distinctive screen printing styles with a bold and for its time, modern approach to typefaces and uses of fonts. 
But when I opened the gallery I was short on original designs so for a while I focused on printing existing old designs of travel posters for cities like Paris, London and holiday locations like the Cote d’Azure. 

Somewhere along the line, I stumbled upon a Titanic poster and for a while I stocked that in the gallery too.  Looking back on it I’m a little mortified - although the sinking of Titanic has clearly led to a huge market in artefacts and collectables - I really should not have attempted to be a part of that. 

Ultimately the story of The Titanic should always be about the huge loss of life first and foremost.  Thankfully my gallery business found its feet with our distinctive railway-inspired retro travel posters and I’m glad that I settled on original, new poster designs rather than trying to re-sell existing designs