I concur! That book store is on my list of places to go in England if I ever get there. Converted railway station with the tea room intact! I had no idea that the poster wasn't used in WW2.
I've seen many parodies of that poster. One I saw at a London antiques market was "Keep Calm and Buy Vintage & Collectables" or something of that nature. Thought it was rather cute.
Today I learnt something - It was never actually used in the War. Never knew that.
One of the more solid errors in war-time movies is to hang that poster on the wall in the background, revealing that you know absolutely nothing about the period you are pretending to create. I've seen it a couple of times, though.
My sister bought us one kitchen apron and two WWII enamel style mugs with the old "Keep Calm and Carry On" moniker on them. They came with a small leaflet talking about the poster and how, contrary to most thought, it was never used during the war.
I think in a day when Britain is struggling so hard to figure out its identity in a way post imperial world, it's a good thing to have this extreme essence of traditional Britishness to contemplate.
I find the whole explosion of this saying/poster highly amusing, as years before it splattered across the media, a friend of ours had an original one in his kitchen.
We said, oh, that's nice, where'd it come from? He said after his company announced a whole raft of redundancies were going to be made, it just appeared on the office wall one day. Everyone had a laugh but no-one admitted they had put it up. Our friend had a closer look, realised it was a rare Wartime poster and one night some time later he took it down, rolled it up and took it home. No-one mentioned it, so he kept it and put it in his kitchen.
I do wonder where it came from, who found it and also, how much an original one of those is worth!
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