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Film poster collection produced by Bradford-based company sell for £165k at auction

Wednesday, 4 March 2020 at 07:00

A collection of original movie and circus posters from a Bradford printing house have sold for £165,000 at auction, three times the estimated auction price.

Bradford-based W E Berry Ltd produced them for Disney, Rank, Universal, Columbia Pictures, Paramount and Ealing Studios starting production for the studios in the 1920s.

The firm was established in the 1880s, creating posters for railway companies and circuses, before moving on to the production of film posters in the 1920s after forming a business relationship with Paramount Pictures.

W E Berry Ltd went on to become one of the leading producers and distributors of film posters, with some of their most famous works including Star Wars and Flash Gordon.

A collection of some of the company’s most iconic posters went under the hammer on Friday in Surrey, with auctioneers stating that the sales exceeded the top estimated asking price of £55,000.

The poster for Creature from the Black Lagoon was the highest seller, going for £22,000, over five times the expected maximum selling price of £4,000.

The hand painted artwork for The Ladykillers, sold for £8,000, while a poster of Alfred Hitchcock's 1937 thriller ‘Young and Innocent’ fetched £4,400, far exceeding the expected price of £200-£400.

A number of other colourful pieces created for Chipperfields Animal Circus - which claimed to be 'Europe's greatest circus' - also sold for hundreds of pounds.

W E Berry Ltd eventually shut down in 2004 after financial losses in the early 2000s forced the company into administration.

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