Vintage Posters
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To Hell With Helvetica: Is an 1874 Type Catalog the World's Most Beautiful Book?
By Ben Marks — William Hamilton Page was not the first American to earn a living cutting slabs of end-grain sugar maple into precisely ornate blocks of wood type, but he was definitely the first American to push this once-ubiquitous printing format into the realm of fine art. The proof of Page’s artistry can be found in , an 1874 sales catalog of wooden fonts and graphic flourishes manufactured by Wm. H. Page & Co. Considered by typography nerds to be “The Most Beautiful Book in the World,” Page’s...
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Visiting Scarfolk, the Most Spectacular Dystopia of the 1970s
By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — Though adults tend to look back on youth as a time of innocence, childhood is actually terrifying. Kids are always privy to more of the world’s horrors than we realize, and those glimpses of war on the evening news or the mutilation on display in anti-drunk-driving films leave permanent scars on their permeable little minds. "I often couldn’t distinguish between what was real and what had been a vivid nightmare." Richard Littler had a frightening childhood, too, but as a designer and...
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Mysterious Railway Posters Depict the Dreamy Allure of Deco-Era Japan
By Ben Marks — As an appraiser on Antiques Roadshow and a consultant to Heritage Auction Galleries, Rudy Franchi is highly sought for his opinion on posters, from propaganda sheets made during World War I and World War II to travel posters printed for the Southern Pacific Railroad and London Underground. In fact, Franchi’s been a professional purveyor of mass-produced printed art since 1970, when he and his wife, Barbara, opened The Nostalgia Factory, whose specialty was movie posters. Which may explain...
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My Goodness! Guinness Collectors Snap Up Secret Stash of Unpublished Advertising Art
By Ben Marks — The biggest cliché in the collecting world is the “discovery” of a previously unknown cache of stuff that’s been hidden away for years until one day, much to everyone’s amazement, the treasure trove is unearthed and the collecting landscape is changed forever. As a corollary to this hoary trope, if you are in the right place at the right time, you can get in on the action before the word gets out. "Some of the canvases were 80 years old, dating from 1930." Cliché or not, that’s roughly...
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Does Facebook Have a Secret Paper Fetish?
By Ben Marks — On February 1, 2012, at exactly 5:02 p.m., the day Facebook announced it was finally going public, the company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, posted a photograph of his desk on his personal Facebook page. Along with a MacBook Air, dry-erase marker, and bottle of G Series Gatorade, Zuck’s work station featured a plain white poster bearing the all-caps red message, “STAY FOCUSED & KEEP SHIPPING.” "Posters give us something to share back to Facebook." Earlier that day, at 11:48 a.m., Ben Barry...
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Disneyland Posters Heat Up Hollywood Auction
By null — On May 14 and 15, 2011, Profiles in History held its latest auction of Hollywood memorabilia in Beverly Hills. The pre-auction buzz was all about the Dude's sweater, which was worn by Jeff Bridges in "The Big Lebowski" and had a pre-sale estimate of $4,000 to $6,000. As it turned out, the sweater was withdrawn, so Lebowski fans will have to content themselves with the Dude tribute sweater from Pendleton, which at $188 is a better value anyway. What did sell like hotcakes, though, were...
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Globe Poster Wood-Type Archive Preserved
By Ben Marks — Good news for poster lovers: the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) is purchasing about 75 percent of the Globe Poster Company’s working collection of wood type, images, and illustrations. Based in Baltimore, Globe was one of the pre-eminent letterpress printers in the United States. Though not as old as Hatch Show Print in Nashville, which has been around since 1879, Globe produced boxing-style letterpress posters for everything from burlesque acts to rhythm-and-blues revues to...
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David Lance Goines Discusses Perfect Poster Design
By Maribeth Keane — I don’t collect posters. I don’t collect anything. I started making posters one at a time by hand in high school just for specific events, basically got going when I was a freshman. I still make them today, but they’re printed on a printing press now. I’ve made 221 posters, not including the ones I did in high school. Fundamentally, I believe that in order to be effective as opposed to artsy and not really effective at all, a poster has to be extremely simple. The Shepard Fairey posters...