So Long, Stuff

This week we began dismantling our lives in the promise of reconstructing them elsewhere afresh. Obviously this starts with a radical de-clutter on that latterday Bonfire of the Vanities, eBay. A Maclamp gave good return alongside an old Routemaster destination blind, but David Hicks books got a huge consumer thumbs-down.

Of all the lots though, I was especially sorry to say so long to a cache of posters (mostly travel & tourism from the 1960s but also this WVS public information number from 1956), a totally 80s Janette Beckman photographic print I found on the street, and a heap of wonderfully pretentious art books we'll realistically never read.

• Janette Beckman, Rosemarie, LA 1981
• The Women’s Voluntary Service was set up in 1938 to augment the work of the ARP. This campaign dates from the early years of the Cold War and was instigated ‘to inform one in five of the women between the ages of 16 and 70 in Great Britain of the simple things they could do to protect their homes and families in the event of nuclear attack – should it ever come.’ [Source: District Nursing Archive]

• Richard Hamilton's typographic version of Marcel Duchamp's The Green Box (1934), 1975 (3rd edition of 2500)