Description

[004158] Fougasse [Bird, Cyril Kenneth]. Careless Talk Costs Lives. ill. Fougasse [Bird, Cyril Kenneth]. No Place: No Publisher. First Edition. Folio. Unbound. Posters. Good. Complete set of eight Careless Talk Costs Lives colour lithographic posters, approximately 205mm x 315mm in size, n.d. but c.1940, presumably produced for the Ministry of Information in London

A couple lightly browned and lightly foxed, otherwise fairly bright and clean

‘Fougasse’ (after a type of anti-personnel mine), was Cyril Kenneth Bird (1887-1965). Shot in the spine at Gallipoli in 1915, he served as an air raid warden during the Second World War, and “his most memorable cartoons from this period are the posters he designed for government departments, such as the red-bordered Careless Talk Costs Lives series (originally entitled Careless Talk May Cost Us All Dear) for the Ministry of Information” (Bryant, Dictionary of Twentieth-Century British Cartoonists and Caricaturists, pages 27-28)

The images were popular, and were reproduced in a variety of formats and sizes, including on textiles