The 1967 Saladin Poster Series: All Eight, Not Six

We have a stack of each. We'd like to find the rest.

If you came up in the late sixties, you knew these posters before you knew the name on them. Thirteen by twenty inches, thick stock, colors that didn't exist in nature. They hung in bedrooms and head shops from one coast to the other.

They were made in 1967 by Saladin Productions, working with Wendell, Ltd. The designs are credited to Bob Wendell and printed as offset lithographs. Serious dealers today classify them as “head shop” posters — retail merchandise sold in shops, not concert announcements.

That's a distinction worth getting right. Bill Graham's Fillmore posters and the Family Dog Avalon posters advertised specific shows and carry their own series numbers. Saladin's were made to be bought and hung, not stapled to a telephone pole. The look came out of the same San Francisco moment — that psychedelic language spread fast and everywhere — but these were their own thing.

The series runs to eight, not six

Most of the record online describes a set of six. That is because a six-poster auction lot has been re-listed and re-cited for years, and it has quietly become the accepted number.

It is not the full set. We catalogued and sold these from our own shelves beginning in the 1990s, and our stock list ran to eight, numbered sequentially. Here they are.

The six most commonly cited are the Doors, Byrds, Turtles, Mamas & Papas, Buckinghams and Electric Prunes. Heritage Auctions has separately catalogued a 1967 Saladin Monkees head shop poster at the same 13 x 20 size, which makes seven.

The eighth one is the interesting one

The fifth poster in the run isn't a band at all. Set in red on a yellow field, in the curling type of the period, it reads:

summer, you say · there is going to be a LOVE-IN in san francisco · this SUMMER JUNE 21st

That date is not arbitrary. June 21, 1967 was the summer solstice, and the dawn gathering in Golden Gate Park that morning is widely recorded as the formal beginning of the Summer of Love.

So the one poster in this series that advertises an event advertises that event — and it was printed to be sold in shops alongside the Doors and the Turtles. We have not found it documented anywhere outside our own records. If you know more about it, we would genuinely like to hear from you.

How to tell what you have

The Saladin sheets measure roughly 13 x 20 inches and were printed on thick, coated index stock — heavier than you'd expect from a poster of that era. The imagery runs to blown-out, high-contrast likenesses of the band in saturated day-glo colors, usually two or three inks on a flat ground. Unused examples have never been folded, pinned, or trimmed.

Which is where you come in

We have new old stock of these — unused, from the original run, never reproduced.

So we're asking. If you have one in a closet, a tube, or a frame that's been on the same wall since 1971, we'd like to hear about it. We buy original stock. We'll also happily just take the story — where you got it, what it cost, whose room it hung in.

Somebody out there knows more about Saladin than the internet does. Probably several somebodies.

Pull up to the burn barrel and tell us. Get in touch, or see the 1960s Rock Posters we have listed now.