Vintage Railroad Posters and Advertising

We are a part of eBay Affiliate Network, and if you make a purchase through the links on our site we earn affiliate commission.

Selling New Zealand: The Railroad Posters That Made a Nation Want To See Their World

In the 21st century, we refer to someone who has grown up with computers, smartphones, and the internet as being “digital native.” Back in 1840, when representatives of Queen Victoria and more than 500 Māori leaders signed the Treaty of Waitangi, one of New Zealand’s founding documents, the pākehā from England who were settling in New Zealand might have been described as “railroad native.” After all, the landscape of their former island nation was beginning to be crisscrossed with railroad...

Māori Modernism: The New Zealand Artist Who Put the Islands' Native People First

Sitting more than 1,000 miles off the eastern coast of Australia, New Zealand is one of the most far-flung places on the planet, which probably explains why New Zealand was the first nation on Earth to make a tourist agency an official part of its government. From its earliest days as a British colony (1841-1907), New Zealand's non-native settlers and indigenous inhabitants alike promoted the island-nation's attractions to pretty much anyone who would listen, as we learned recently when we...

Go Canada! When Gorgeous Graphic Design Lured the World to the Great White North

On November 7, 1885, when Canadian philanthropist Donald A. Smith drove a ceremonial last spike into his country’s transcontinental railroad at Craigellachie, British Columbia, almost 3,000 miles of tracks were finally joined as one. Given Canada’s immense size and inhospitable climate compared with its southern neighbor—whose shorter, 1,907-mile transcontinental railroad was opened in 1869—the completion of Canada's transcontinental railroad marked the beginning of a vigorous global...

Mysterious Railway Posters Depict the Dreamy Allure of Deco-Era Japan

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...

David Lance Goines Discusses Perfect Poster Design

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...