I remember Paul Gorman saying of Barney Bubbles, just shortly after his book about the graphic designer, Reasons To Be Cheerful, had been published, that he was the ‘gift that keeps on giving’. Gorman, apparently, kept getting sent things people thought Bubbles may have designed that didn’t make it into the first edition of the book, and that Gorman hadn’t uncovered in all the research he had conducted.
I feel the same is true of Bob Linney, that he is the ‘gift that keeps on giving’, although for very different reasons—every time I visit his widow Jacky to help with the planning of the Finding Bob Linney retrospective exhibition, along with Tony Casement of Halesworth’s The Cut Arts Centre, more about Linney’s life and work is revealed to me than I could have previously imagined. In our meeting yesterday, Jacky bought out lots of work her husband had done for the National Trust which I wasn’t aware of.
You just couldn’t imagine the organisation veering so far away from its corporate brand identity today.
Much of this work appears to date from the early 1990s, although some of it was still being reprinted at the turn of the millennium. Contentiously, several leaflets, such as ‘Nature Conservation and The National Trust‘, are sponsored by ESSO—an early example of greenwashing, maybe. Again, this is a collaboration you can’t imagine happening today.
Jacky also bought out posters for the familiar Open Studios, (familiar if you are from Suffolk, that is), with one printed with a green/blue gradient. This is so untypical of the colourways Linney would usually use, we pondered why he might have gone in this direction.
I wonder if this version was intended for a previous year and the date information at the bottom printed at a later time than planned, given that the white spaces on this section were clearly meant to match up with the counters of letterforms, as was correctly printed in the title at the top of the poster. Bob was an expert screen printer, and this seems like a very rare error in his usually precision registration.
The most exciting thing about yesterday’s meeting though was that I finally got to meet the man himself, albeit via a video Jacky had uncovered of him talking about his work.
This had been recorded in 2019 as a ‘long distant chat’ with Mario Panciera, a collector of ‘all things punk’, who had many of Linney’s posters. It was a chance to hear his voice for the first time, and to find out a little about his process.
We unanimously agreed that the full video should feature in the exhibition.
The planning towards Finding Bob Linney continues, and our next two meetings in January and February 2026 will be to start selecting what we want in the show. There are also plans for a 16 page A5+ ‘zine’, and a lecture. I’ve got my work cut out for me, but it’s the sort of work that doesn’t feel like work, the best kind.
Finding Bob Linney will be on display at The Cut, Halesworth, Suffolk,
from Tuesday 26 May–Saturday 18 July, 2026. More details to follow.
Nigel Ball 
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