Rare 1920s Montauk poster bought for $12,500
A 1920s poster promoting the Montauk Manor at Swann Auction Galleries in Manhattan. (Oct. 16 2013) Credit: Jeremy Bales
A rare 1920s poster of Montauk was auctioned off Friday for $12,500 to an anonymous buyer in Manhattan.
Before the show, Swann Auction Gallery estimated the unsigned poster, advertising the vision of industrialist Carl Fisher, would garner $12,000 to $18,000.
An identical poster in better condition sold for $26,000 at auction in 2011. It had been owned by Mark J. Weinbaum, a Manhattan vintage poster collector.
On Friday's poster, which had a small crease line and touched-up areas around the edges, showed Art Deco-dressed sportsmen and women, holding a golf club, bow, croquet mallet, fishing rod, and other activities that might have been popular among the Roaring '20s aristocracy.
It was designed to beckon Manhattanites out to the "slender tip of Long Island" to the development being pushed by Fisher, the industrialist who had successfully developed Miami Beach.
The poster was believed to have been produced shortly before the 1929 stock market crash, and was never put up in train stations. By 1932, Fisher's Montauk project was bankrupt.
Friday's sale included a full lot of travel posters, one of which sold for thousands more than the 2011 near-perfect Montauk poster: A piece promoting a 1909 Wright brothers air show in Dayton, Ohio, was bought for $35,000.
Out East: Mecox Bay Dairy, Kent Animal Shelter, Custer Institute & Observatory and local champagnes NewsdayTV's Doug Geed takes us "Out East," and shows us different spots you can visit this winter.
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