I will eventually fill up with lots more posters, but for now I will concentrate on one particular poster. The first time I got to see Ghost was in early June 2011, at the small festival "Muskelrock" in the South of Sweden. This is also the place where I first saw this glorious poster for sale and I desperately wanted it - but I had no cash! I had travelled by myself and knew no-one to borrow from! I had to leave without being able to buy it.
For several months I regretted this. The memory of the lost poster haunted me. I saw it in front of me when I closed my eyes and I searched the web for it but never found it.
I was lucky enough to catch the band some months later at "Malmöfestivalen" and to my big relief the poster was still available and I bought two copies.
One of them remains rolled up in a tube and the other one is hanging proudly on one of my walls, alongside some other Ghost posters that will be presented at a later time.
Ghost-wall
The poster itself is quite large at about 70 x 100 cm (you will have to do the maths yourself to translate that into foot or inches...) and it´s a very high quality screenprint on thick paper.
Several years went by and I kept on searching for the poster occasionally, but I never even found a picture of it. Not until Sweden Rock Magazine, in their July 2013 issue, had a big special on Watain and their main man Erik Danielsson, who of course is the man behind some of Ghosts great designs and this poster in particular.
At the end of the article there is a small special on Erik and his work with Ghost, and there - in the background lower right-hand corner - I saw the poster for the first time except for the one on my wall!
The only other time I have ever seen the poster was very recently (this is written november 29, 2014) at the Swedish auction site Tradera. At the end of November 2014 it was offered up for sale - to my knowledge - for the first time ever. It sold for SEK 876, which is about $ 115. To be honest I thought it would go for at least $ 200.
The poster is limited to 100 copies, each of them hand-numbered and signed by Erik Danielsson. It is long, long out of print and it looks great. It should sell for a lot more than $ 115.
My theory is that this poster is so rare that most collectors don´t even know it exist. It was only ever sold in Sweden, at the early stage of the band´s career. When the hype around the band reached its epic proportions, the poster was long gone and stored away safely among the few collectors who lucky enough to get one.
Perhaps collectors saw the poster on Tradera but thought it was a fake, some kind of home-order cheap print to cash in on the band´s hardcore following. I´m here to tell you that this poster is state of the art. It´s the real deal and it´s absolutely GREAT!
More posters to follow shortly.
