In pursuit of print

Long before he founded Martin Randall Travel in 1988, Martin Randall was collecting antique prints – etchings, engravings, lithographs, woodcuts – bought from backstreet bookshops and print fairs. It was this private passion he eventually turned to when the young company needed images for its publications: rather than use stock photographs, he reached for the print room, where an image can be a historical document as much as a work of art. The result was a visual identity unlike any other in the travel industry, one we still delight in today. Here, we ask him how it came about.

Where did your interest in prints begin?

With a shop called Suckling & Co in Cecil Court – the narrow alley connecting Charing Cross Road and St Martin’s Lane in London. I was 16, writing an essay on Lord Burghley, Elizabeth I’s chief minister, for a school history prize. I went in search of an engraved portrait of him. I didn’t win the prize. But prints became a passion, and I went on to form a collection – small and motley, scoured from the damp basements of backstreet antiquarian bookshops and minor antique markets.

I still have the invoice and correspondence from my second purchase: 22 May 1972, prints of Mary Herbert, ordered by telephone from Suckling & Co at around 4.15 in the afternoon. Four prints arrived on approval the following day; I kept two, priced at 25p and 15p, and returned the others with a 43p postal order. Postage was 3p. A different world.

How did a personal passion become part of the company’s identity?

About 20 years after that first purchase, it dawned on me that we could use antique prints to illustrate our marketing publications. We had no budget for professional photography or reproduction rights, and my view was that amateur photographs wouldn’t adequately evoke the exceptional experiences we were trying to sell. The solution came to me in the night, literally: I leapt out of bed and went rootling in the lower regions of the wardrobe where my precious prints were stored.

There weren’t many relevant topographical views in my personal collection, so the firm would have to start buying – with very slender resources. I remember looking longingly at an Edwardian etching of Santa Maria della Salute in Venice and walking away because it was £16 and our agreed maximum was £14. Happy ending: it was still there a year later. I bought it, and it has done sterling service ever since.

What makes this approach genuinely distinctive?

‘Unique’ is a word to treat with caution, but it can be used with confidence here. No other travel company illustrates its publications with original prints – and our visual identity acquired a distinctiveness that is acknowledged as exemplary by professional designers and marketers. The prints are also apposite in other ways: they show the places our travellers visit, and they are remarkably economical to reproduce. With an out-of-copyright image there is no owner or artist’s estate to pay.

How large did the collection become?

There are about 5,000 loose prints and an uncountable number of engraved images bound into some 600 volumes – among them Edwardian travel books illustrated with beautifully reproduced watercolours. I should record that we have never ‘broken’ a book – ripped out the prints and discarded the rest – which is a regrettably common practice in the antiques trade.

Wherever I travelled I hunted for print shops: Boston to Belgrade, Stockholm to Seville, Cardiff to Kolkata. I came eventually to the view that London remains by far the best city for collectors, even as the number of specialist dealers has declined, more precipitously than their counterparts in second-hand books.

How does the collection serve the company today?

The prints continue to appear across everything we produce – brochures, advertisements, the website – and the archives are trawled constantly for images that extend the range. The distinct visual character they give us is as valuable as it ever was; if anything, the best prints can be appreciated more fully now, reproduced at the quality modern print and screen allow. All the staff have their favourites and as fresh images surface there is delight from various quarters. The ones illustrated in this feature are among the finest in the collection.

And Cecil Court – where it all started?

A few print dealers survive there still; it may be the only street in central London consisting entirely of independent antiquarian and artistic specialist shops. That they endure is largely thanks, I’m told, to an enlightened landlord – one who tolerates the idiosyncratic ways in which such businesses are run and whose office is prepared to cope with them. That landlord is the Marquess of Salisbury: a direct descendant of Lord Burghley, subject of the very first print I ever bought.