Neal Walters Circus Poster & Woodblocks, ca. 1950
GUEST: My grandfather, Neal Walters, started a circus poster printing company in Eureka Springs in the late '30s, '40s maybe. And they printed circus posters there until they moved to Bentonville in like '62 or '63. And then they continued on printing them from Bentonville. These three are hand-carved plates that my uncle carved. There was 11 total kids that helped run the printing presses and do the carving of all the plates. Like, these faces are faces of my aunts and uncles and family members.
APPRAISER: Come on, like who?
GUEST: This is my Aunt Peggy and my Aunt Sally. Kind of a combination of them, even the gap. (chuckles) And this is one of my uncles, and this one is an uncle. And this one, I think, is just somebody who ran the presses. That's the information I've been given about it. I inherited them when my mother passed away in 2006.
APPRAISER: The company printed mostly for circuses that were on the smaller end, so, so Birnam Brothers, nobody's heard of them, but everybody knows Ringling Brothers. And all of the posters they did were woodblock prints.
GUEST: Yes.
APPRAISER: And what these are, are progressive colors. They would have been printed on top of each other...
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: ...to make an image like the one you have...
GUEST: Mm-hmm
APPRAISER: ...with red, yellow and blue ink. So these three images combined to make a single clown's face.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: And so then I went online and I found it. It was done for
a wild animal exposition.
GUEST: (gasps)
APPRAISER: And the poster that I found was for "Tex Carson's
Wild Animal Circus.” And it was a poster that was printed in Eureka Springs.
GUEST: (chuckling): Oh my gosh. Wow.
APPRAISER: It's in one institution. And online they say that that circus only operated between 1951 and 1956.
GUEST: Oh.
APPRAISER: So that's a five-year window that we can definitively date these have being used to, which is wonderful.
GUEST: Cool.
APPRAISER: So the poster that's next to you, which is imprinted with the Bentonville imprint...
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: ....would be from at least 1963, so sometime in the '60s.
GUEST: Yes.
APPRAISER: What your grandfather's company did was basically create images with blank text boxes on top so different circuses could buy the image and fill in their own name.
GUEST: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
APPRAISER: So it's very possible you would see this image advertising a different circus.
GUEST: Oh, yes.
APPRAISER: Uh, they're called stock posters. So now the question, what are they worth?
GUEST: Yeah.
APPRAISER: Let's start with the poster next to you. They're not particularly valuable. They're not for famous circuses. So I found that poster online for the Birnam Brothers selling for about $150.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: It's a great poster, if you like clowns.
GUEST: Yeah.
APPRAISER: But there really is no record of these kind of wood block prints of a clown face coming up for sale. Were these to come up at auction, as a set, just the wood blocks, not the poster.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: They'd sell for between $6,000 and $9,000.
GUEST: Wow. That's amazing.
APPRAISER: And I'm not clowning around.
GUEST: That's amazing. (laughs)
$6,150 - $9,150 Auction
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Understanding Our Appraisals
Executive producer Marsha Bemko shares her tips for getting the most out of ANTIQUES ROADSHOW.
Value can change: The value of an item is dependent upon many things, including the condition of the object itself, trends in the market for that kind of object, and the location where the item will be sold. These are just some of the reasons why the answer to the question "What's it worth?" is so often "It depends."
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