Recto v. verso Pt. II
I am somewhat alarmed that I have not written anything for the blog since early January. I was, in fact, frantically trying to figure out where entries (surely at least one post!) had disappeared but alas, there has not been any. So, to ease into the blog writing routine – or the attempt at one – I thought I would start with an entry about what you can find at the backs of objects in an archive and how delightful these can be. I have written about another discovery I made a few years ago on the verso of a Macdonald Gill poster, so do have a look at that post too if the subject interests you!
Our Archives Cataloguer Ellen Taylor has been busy working her way through the documents in the Icograda Archive. She stumbled upon some rather surprising divider boards used in-between the documents. On one side they look like ‘your regular archival pieces’ with hand-written notes in pen…
… but on the other they are pieces of advertisement boards for Clayton’s Orange Squash!
We thought we might find some more puzzle pieces to try and put together the original advertisements, but so far the only one resembling a whole is the image below: although these two pieces do not fit together perfectly, I was very happy about this discovery. I suppose one man/woman’s verso is another one’s recto and vice versa!
Out of interest I carried out a quick internet search with the phrase ‘Clayton’s Orange Squash’ to attempt to find out specific dates for these particular adverts. The first (and only relevant) hit to the search term was a link to one of our black and white photographs on Jisc Media Hub. The above pieces of Clayton’s colour advertisements were used in the 1960s as dividers inside the documentation held in the Icograda Archive, one of the 20 holdings we look after. Willy de Majo, whose archive we also hold, was the founding president of Icograda. He designed packaging for Clayton’s and a collection of black and white photographs of his designs exist in the Design Council Archive… It’s these neat connections between our holdings that make working in the Design Archives so brilliant!