Montauk Poster Snares Thousands At Auction

Since October 19, Montauk Library has welcomed a number of visitors who weren’t looking for books.

Instead, they’ve been seeking out the reproduction of a circa-1929 poster by an unknown artist featuring the easternmost Long Island destination at its finest. It has hung relatively unnoticed for years among the library’s bookshelves.

Until now.

That’s because on October 18, an original copy similar to the one hanging in the library sold at auction for $12,500. Though an extraordinary sum for a poster, vintage or otherwise, it’s not the highest dollar one of its kind has fetched, according to Nicholas Lowry, the man who handled the sale. Mr. Lowry is president of Swann Auction Gallery in Manhattan and director of its vintage poster department.

The version that has been hanging in the library looks the same but it’s actually a copy of another original—which has the exact same image, but was in pristine condition—that sold in 2011 for $29,500.

The poster—which depicts a number of casually dressed, sportswear-clad, wealthy-looking types—touts “Montauk Beach” as a resort area. It describes “The Gateway to Montauk, on the Slender tip of Long Island, N.Y.” as being “125 Miles Out In The Cool Atlantic!” An illustrated image of Montauk Manor floats above the chic sportsmen and women, who are positioned on a representational map of the area.

“It was the only time we’d seen the poster before,” Mr. Lowry—an appraiser for “Antiques Roadshow” on PBS—recalled last week during a telephone interview of the 2011 piece. “I have been in this business for 17 years. When I see something I haven’t seen before, it’s always very exciting and unusual. By definition, posters are not unique pieces of art. They were advertisements, meant to be distributed broadly. But this one was not.”

Though it is unclear how many such posters were made—and how many of those even survived—one thing is for certain: the promoter, which was likely the Pennsylvania Railroad, pulled them from local stations for a reason. When the Great Depression hit, the hamlet’s development—envisioned and financed by industrialist Carl Fisher—came to a grinding halt. There was no use broadcasting an up-and-coming vacation spot that had already gone belly up, Mr. Lowry said.

The same logic has been applied to other historic catastrophes. When the RMS Titanic collided with an iceberg and sank on its maiden voyage from London to New York, advertisements for the infamous cruise ship’s expected return were pulled and destroyed, Mr. Lowry explained.

“They said, ‘Get rid of all these ads.’ The ones that survived were very, very, very rare,” he said. “Montauk is not quite the same, but it’s the same idea. Things fell to pieces, promotion-wise. But from the start, like any good advertisement, they were weaving a dream. This may have been an advance ad.”

After transforming a Floridian swampland into Miami Beach in the early 1900s, Mr. Fisher soon found himself on the easternmost tip of Long Island. He saw it as the “Miami Beach of the north,” according to Robin Strong, an archivist at the Montauk Library. He and four associates purchased 9,000 acres and built a number of attractions—including a yacht club, polo field, tennis courts and Montauk Manor resort, which was completed in 1927.

“A stagecoach would pick you up from the train and bring you up the hill to the Manor,” Ms. Strong said last week during a telephone interview. “All of the people depicted on the poster—the fisherman, the swimmer, the flapper, the horseback rider—these were all things you could do by staying there. It would have been very much like Newport, had he succeeded.”

In 1926, a devastating hurricane hit Miami Beach, destroying many of Fisher’s investments there that financed his Montauk venture. And to make matters worse, the stock market Crash of 1929 struck, followed by the Great Depression, sending his bankrupt East End endeavor into receivership three years later.

“It wasn’t a long run, but he did have his dream until the crash. That killed him. It put him out of business,” Ms. Strong said. “It really wasn’t a long time we’re talking about, but what a major impact on the town, by building all of these things and bringing his pals to buy homes. He wanted to make it for very wealthy people. It would have been a lot different than the Montauk we know.”

She hesitated, and continued, “Well, now it’s changing. Maybe he was the original hipster, who knows. This poster has Carl Fisher written all over it.”

The scarcity of original prints points to only 500 to 2,000 ever made, Mr. Lowry estimated. Posters were not fine art, he said, so no one kept a record and not many held onto them—especially after the crash.

“There were a few intrepid souls who said, ‘I don’t care,’ and squirreled them away,” he said. “It was a beautiful travel poster of a gold-sanded, weekend and holiday place with a ‘Great Gatsby’ feel. It’s really incredible.”

Despite minor tears, a small crease line and touched up edges, Mr. Lowry explained that he had expected the slightly attenuated poster to snare as much as $18,000 at auction. There was a “fair amount of interest” between three or four bidders, he said, though that doesn’t compare to the near-perfect Montauk poster that sold for nearly $30,000 in 2011.

“It was still very good and very visual, but very clearly—and we made it clear—it was not the best example we’d seen by a long shot. It looked like a piece of paper that’s been hanging around for 90-plus years,” Mr. Lowry said of the recent poster. “The previous copy we had was, literally, crisp and clean and looked like it had been put in a closet and never saw the light of day.”

After the first poster fetched such a high price, the seller—whom Mr. Lowry declined to identify—gave the Montauk Library a reproduction a couple years back, which was then framed and recently moved upstairs from the basement near the director’s office, Ms. Strong said, after news of the most recent sale appeared in a Newsday article. The community’s interest was piqued, she said.

“He was just a local. I guess he had a home here and wanted us to have a copy of it,” Ms. Strong said of the original seller. “It went for so much money. The artwork is beautiful. It’s a kind of vibe, this Montauk vibe that people are really into. Everyone has really wanted to see it. And now everyone can.”