The annotation to the originals of nine maquettes of posters by Bob Cobbing offered for sale reads as follows. The origins and progress of London's theatrical, film andpoetic avant gardes and a significant tranche of the counterculture are traceable through these unique events posters (and one pure artwork) produced by a small and obscuregroup that emerged from the unlikely setting of suburban Hendon and Finchley. Bob Cobbing was the group's guiding spirit and founder, Britain's "major exponent of concrete, visual and sound poetry" (Guardian Obituary). He almost singlehandedly started, or at least inspired, the small DIY press revolution in Britain, founding the influential Writers' Forum, the long running "And' 'zine (copies of which are available above), and revitalising the experimental poetry scene in London in the process. Cobbing grew up in Enfield in a very strict family of fundamentalist Plymouth Brethren of hardworking signwriters (Guardian Obituary). He inherited conscientious objection, astrong Protestant work ethic and, as we can see in this cache of materials, a talent for handmaking public signage from his Brethren parents. Cobbing created his first poems with an office duplicator in the early forties, founded the Hendon Experimental Art Club in 1951, a division of Hendon Arts Together that was renamed "Group H' by 1957. The poster for "Group H' included here is a very simple fifties style design of collaged patterns and crude graphics, perhaps in the same genre as fabric design and the jazzy modernist paperbacks from the period. It is divided into two sections, "1. The Group" and "2. The Future". Considering that it is half a century old, It is a remarkable survival of a very fragile and ephemeral item. Another poster in the same genre is one for "Music Jazz", decorated with triangles, grids and playing cards. It is entirely possible that these designs are related to or partly created by Lewis Cook as an attempt at "portraying sound visually" (interview with Cobbing on Ubuweb). Cobbing expounded on this in the same interview: "My wife, at that time, would take little strips of coloured paper and make linear notations of sound. Lewis Cook would create a great blaze of colour on the canvas. I was doing these scruffy, little black and white images to start with, which turned eventually into colour images". As well as Lewis Cook, Group H's other "grown-up" artists included the controversial conceptualist John Latham, sculptor Barry Flanagan, John Furnival, Bruce Lacey, Criton Tomasoz, John Rowan and of course Nuttall and Cobbing. The book entitled "Bomb Culture" by Jeff Nuttall give us an impressionistic history of the postwar London arts scene and of Group H's public exhibits in particular. He described the"average" Group H exhibition as looking like "a cross between a carrosel [sic] and a concentration camp" (p.170). The "Music Jazz" that Cobbing loved so much often accompanied Group H's exhibitions; Nuttall rather poetically described this as "the jangling barell-organ [sic] jazz of amateurs ..." (op. cit). Nuttall saw Hendon Arts Together as a "far-out division of the Finchley Society of Arts ... a pretty tepid collection ofpublic virgins, who divided themselves from their far-out division over the inclusion of a new youth group in their ranks" (p.169). This "youth division" was a "bunch of kidstaught by John Moate and me, finally by Cobbing as well, mostly from the Alder School, a forbidding secondary modern in East Finchley" (op. cit.). This was a truly innovative group, the likes of which has not been seen since Tim Rollins and K.O.S. Nuttall lauded the poetry, sculpture, drawn and assemblage work of the schoolchildren, thus: "They did possibly the finest junk sculpture I've ever seen, together with fantastic erotic paintings and drawings. They wrote an odd wayward kind of poetry" (op. cit.). This sentiment is affirmed by a strange poster/scratch board/ideas sheet or visual poem in thecollection. The first statement in yellow crayon over a band of green wash declares: "The best work comes from children between four and six." Below this is a list of Abstract Expressionist and other painters such as Rothko, Lucio Fontana, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb and Rene Burri. From 1963 onwards, Writers' Forum, like its sister 'zine"And', published Cobbing's own work and anything that he considered experimental,concrete and imaginative. These included Anselm Hollo, Ginsberg's "The Change', Eric Mottram, Claude Pelieu, Ernst Jandl, B.P. Nichol, P.J. O'Rourke, Bill Griffiths, John Cage, Nuttall and many others. With over a thousand titles published, it is perhaps one of the most significant outputs of any twentieth century small press and as such, this poster is a significant marker of the early days. The Writers' Forum poster in this collection, entitled "Imagination", is a crude assemblage of childlike scribbles and drawings including a clown, the night sky and various textural images. The lettering is starkly drawn in black and red felt pens.Cobbing's Hendon Film Society (HFS) and Cinema 61 were important historical precursors to the influential London Film Makers' Co-operative (LFMC). The HFS was a traditional group for screenings of films such as Laurel and Hardy's "Murder Case', Resnais' "Guernica', Carl Dreyer's "The Passion of Joan of Arc' and Sergei Eisenstein's silent film "Strike'. Original handbill designs for these four films are included here. Three of them appear to be stencilled with paint additions and one "Strike' is a combination of charcoal and wash. In contrast, Film 61 is considered to be the "protoype' for the vanguardism of the LFMC (St Martin's Artists' Film and Video Study Collection website) .In his role as manager of the important countercultural bookshop "Better Books', Cobbing fostered a rich environment of Happenings and Performance Art. This isrepresented with a poster included here for Jeff Nuttall, Mark Long, John Darling and Sid Palmer's "People Show No.13' a presentation of "Golden Slumbers' in the basementof Better Books. The People Show was formed in December of 1966. The hand-drawn poster here is for performances in July and August with no year given. If the Show wasfollowing chronological and numerical conventions, the poster must be after 1967, as this cataloguer has seen another printed poster, in the same hand and lavishpsychedelic style, for a performance of No.4 with Ono's "Bottoms' film at RIBA . According to their website, the group is now, in 2008, up to People Show #119. In hisseminal book on postwar British culture entitled "Bomb Culture', Nuttall described the People Show as a "...theatre group who combine techniques from music hall, happening,straight drama, cabaret, funhouse, and children's party, [who] sometimes ventured out of their domain in Better Books [sic] basement to perform at UFO" (p.222). This wasthe culmination of a long association, Cobbing had duplicated the first issue of "My Own Mag' for Nuttall way back in 1963 when they first met at the school where they both worked. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.