Last Night But Two!
In one of the comments of our recent blog post about the Furore magazine, someone was asking for a picture of the ‘Mr Kite’ poster. Piet Schreuders has kindly sent us his image of the poster, as pieced together by lots of photos he took while visiting the John & Yoko Double Fantasy exhibition in Liverpool. The poster is displayed in a glass box in a dimly lit corner of the museum. It is quite impossible to take close-ups of it, due to the glass box, and even the poster itself is framed in glass which reflects its surroundings. When Schreuders visited the Museum of Liverpool in August, he took about 50 pictures of it, and this is a composite of those.
The original poster, as photographed by Piet Schreuders.
As we all know, the poster advertises ‘The last night but three’ of Pablo Fanques’ Circus in Town-Meadows, Rochdale. Schreuders was wondering whether other posters of that week’s performances might have survived, even though that despite a worldwide interest to find one, none had come to light for 51 years. But then he found this, a poster of the same circus in the same town, two days later, February 16th, 1843 — the Last Night But Two!
Last night but two! poster found by Piet Schreuders
Depicted in the Furore magazine, who has kindly given us permission to post these pictures. Coincidentally, and possibly unknown to Lennon, the engraver who made the woodblocks depicting the acrobats was a fellow Liverpudlian, Thomas Fife.
In order to fully appreciate these vintage posters, you should click on the images to make them bigger, and by right-clicking them and selecting “open in another window” you will also be able to study the details even closer.
The size of the original “Benefit of Mister Kite” poster is 530 x 270 mm (including the frame), and the reproduction poster included with the super DeLuxe Sgt Pepper edition from last year is a bit smaller, but keep the proportions of the original, which none of the earlier reproductions managed to do.
This blog has pursued the tales of this circus poster earlier, here are links to two of our stories:
Who's going to write a song from this poster?!
Please can we have the name and location of the shop John purhcased it from. Some accounts state Sevenoaks, others state Westerham
According to the article, the shop is likely to have been Andrew Mair, Antiques, 44a High Street, Sevenoaks, now an estate agent's office.