TWO vintage advertising posters designed by Bolton-educated artist Tom Eckersley have sold for £1,750 at an auction.

Mr Eckersley’s 1938 poster, Scientists Prefer Shell, You Can Be Sure Of Shell, sold for £1,000 at the auction at Christie’s in South Kensington, London.

At the same sale, his 1948 poster for Gillette razors, emblazoned with the words ‘All over the world, good mornings begin with Gillette”, went for £750.

After leaving Lords College in Bolton, Mr Eckersley went on to become one of Britain’s outstanding poster artists and in 1948 he was awarded an OBE for his services to poster design.

Some of his posters are now owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in New York, while others are on display at the Imperial War Museum in London, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Library of Congress in America and the National Gallery of Australia.

Nicolette Tomkinson, head and director of the posters department at Christie’s said: “Eckersley’s work is hugely important.

“He was a pioneering designer and his work has influenced many that have come after him.

“His posters are now highly sought after and they can only go up in value.”

According to the Guinness Book of Advertising, Eckersley’s work is “charac-terised by a witty typographical playfulness and bold, highly stylised illust-ration.

“Bright simple shapes are carefully positioned to achieve a form of ingenious visual shorthand.”

This year marks the centenary of Mr Eckersley’s birth on September 30, 1914, shortly after the start of World War One.

He was the son of dairy farmer John Eckersley and wife Eunice who lived at Laburnum Farm, Newton Road, Lowton.

Mr Eckersley was an award-winning student at Salford School of Art where he met and befriended fellow student, Eric Lombers, with whom he collaborated on the Shell poster. He died on August 1, 1997, aged 82.