NEW FREEDOM, Pa. – The fiercely mustachioed gentleman in tweed starts with luggage stickers from the grand hotels of Europe before moving to the era of “dog celebrity,” roughly 1919 to World War II, when one could find Airedale brand cigars and Bulldog jar gaskets.
Minor diversions follow: a discussion of matchbook advertising and a short course on roller-rink decals that skaters slapped onto their shoeboxes in the ’30s.
At this point, the conversation seemingly winded, George Theofiles twirls the tips of his facial topiary, says something about “making a long story somewhat shorter,” and launches into a monologue about the obsessions of collectors – something he knows a bit about.
In an unmarked 1840 barn several hills south of York, Theofiles runs Miscellaneous Man, a mail-order poster business, transforming a lifelong passion for ephemera into catalogs that capitalize on what he calls “collector dementia.”
“There are people interested in nothing but candle advertising,” he says, standing on a landing decorated with a Michelin Tire man, Kool penguin lighters and Black and White Scotch scotties. “And shoes. There’s cheerleading history. Cameras, of course, are very popular. And the WPA. I’ve got a pretzel collector. His only interest is pretzel advertising. He’s a very well-to-do guy. What he does is take a day off from his company and meander around New Jersey and Pennsylvania and New York State, trying to find a new pretzel. By now, he’s found them all, certainly, but he keeps hoping to find some new variant.”
Theofiles, 51, pulls a favorite acquisition from a drawer – a series of tabloidlike photos of derelict toilets bearing the captions “foul,” “offensive,” “terrible,” “reeking,” “horrible” and “filthy” – each one slightly different. “The Nation Needs More and Better Plumbing,” the large type trumpets, part of a 1939 campaign by the Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Co. of Pittsburgh.
“It’s macabre,” he says. But with four customers interested solely in plumbing posters, it could have a new home soon.
Miscellaneous Man is deeply into the iconography of the industrial age – patriotic, political, manufacturing and commercial appeals from the early days of the century, when bold images and blunt language aimed to persuade a barely literate audience. Theofiles’ hangings have lent authenticity to such period films as Avalon and That Thing That You Do. They decorate the walls of Hollywood offices and feed the idiosyncratic cravings of famously observant collectors such as playwright David Mamet.
Most people do business with Theofiles by phone or mail. He has no roadside sign, and over his door, which is around back, there are these uninviting words: “Absolutely by appointment.” He does receive some visitors – one from Italy a week ago, one from France the week before that. Nothing is done by e-mail; he isn’t on the Internet. He ships his posters in what he calls “gorilla-proof” tubes.
Miscellaneous Man’s prices range from $35 for a World War II bond appeal to a $3,600 theatrical poster for the 1896 production of La Dame aux Camelias starring Sarah Bernhardt. The vast majority of his pieces go for less than $500.
Theofiles acknowledges violating a cardinal rule of business: He sells only what he likes. He stocks nothing produced in the last 30 years, explaining, “It takes a bit more than a generation to sort things out.”
He’s partial to Ecuadoran travel posters from the ’30s, Ronald Reagan movie ads by Italian illustrators who grew up drawing saints, German celebrations of household objects, and sensual French imagery, such as the Pneu Velo Baudou piece in his gallery, showing a red-headed siren holding a white tire.
“Anybody can make a wine poster, because wine is sexy,” he says. “It’s indulgent. It’s upper class. This guy did a beautiful job selling a tire.”
Since he was 8 or 9, Theofiles has collected. The son of a Greek restaurant owner, he was hooked the day he went to an American Legion rummage sale near his Seaford, Del., home, and saw, tacked to the wall, a torn “I Want You” enlistment poster for the U.S. Army.
“It was 75 cents or 50 cents, and I was impressed,” he says. He later learned the Uncle Sam poster was a self-portrait of illustrator James Montgomery Flagg from 1917.
“I was a nerdy kid interested in lots of eccentric things not available to me.” He collected five-cent advertising trading cards from the turn of the century, early-American magazines, political buttons. Childhood myopia gave him an acute sense of the components of an image. “I would look at all the details of things. I realized big pictures were made up of little things, dots and crosshatchings of color.”
When he was about 13, his mother tired of hauling him to swap meets. “You’ll have to find a way to support your hobbies,” he remembers her saying. He helped finance his education at the Maryland Institute College of Arts by such finds as the 1939 Stagecoach movie posters he spotted at a New York junk store. He sold them for $19 a piece. Today one of them can fetch $12,000.
After school, Theofiles opened a poster shop in Baltimore’s Fells Point neighborhood and after a couple of years began issuing catalogs. His girlfriend soured on the city in 1973, and he picked New Freedom from a map. The girlfriend then moved to Philadelphia to become a model, and Theofiles met the daughter of a fellow who restored Citroens. He and the woman, now his wife, Shirley, have two children, a boxer named Wilbur, and an 1860s house whose kitchen is filled with vintage champagne buckets.
“The world is filled with cheap, great stuff if you’re willing to look,” Theofiles says, back on the subject of his customers’ passions. One is interested only in posters about corrugation. Another wants images about a type of aluminum used in the skins of zeppelins and early Fokker aircraft. This leads to asides about the collectibles market in condom wrappers. Theofiles, pulls up short however, recognizing he’s gone off track again.
“My biggest collection,” he says, “seems to be red herrings.”
By Daniel Rubin, staff writer. Posted March 31, 1999
Daniel Rubin 