The 'Keep Calm and Carry On' copyists
If you Google ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’, you will now get many results. A whole minor industry has sprung up around our rediscovered poster with everyone seemingly jumping on the bandwagon.
The poster is out of copyright. And though one of our copyists tried, you can't register the slogan as a trademark. (He even threatened to sue us for selling the poster he himself had bought from us, removed our name and copied.) This particular copyist - Mark Coop, trading as keepcalmandcarryon - took our 'Keep Calm' history, changed a few words and used that as his own, once again without acknowledgement. As a defence, we adopted the slogan 'Home of the Original', so he adopted the slogan 'Home of Keep Calm' – full marks for initiative, but zero for ethics!
Others, however, have gone out of their way to acknowledge us. We see that as being somehow in the spirit of the poster, itself. Two examples are McClaggan-Smith, the makers of the mug, who have put our website on the bottom of every Keep Calm mug. And Yes No Maybe who sell a wide range of Keep Calm apparel.
What makes our copy any better than anyone else's?
It will probably be cheaper, often much cheaper.
And it will be a 1st generation copy. Not a second or tenth or even (who knows by now!) a hundredth.
And (this has got to be good!) it will come from the bookshop where it was rediscovered.
posters
t-shirts
aprons &
mugs &
postcards,