Vintage Travel Posters — Restored WPA Originals & Retro National Park Prints
Real vintage travel posters, not vintage-style: more than forty original WPA Federal Art Project posters from 1936 to 1943, restored from the Library of Congress scans and printed whole at their native proportions, from Grand Canyon, Zion, Yellowstone and Lassen to See America, the National Parks Preserve Wild Life series and the WPA's city posters for Chicago, New York and Philadelphia. Alongside them, retro national park and landscape prints drawn in-house in the same idiom.
70 prints · printed to order on heavyweight matte paper · framed or unframed
What the WPA posters were
Between 1936 and 1943 the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project employed out-of-work artists to design posters for the government: for the national parks and the See America travel campaign, for zoos, museums, health campaigns and state tourism boards. Roughly 35,000 designs were produced by silkscreen, lithograph and woodcut, and about 2,000 are known to survive; the Library of Congress holds more than 900 of them, the largest group anywhere, and because they are United States government works they are in the public domain. The flat colour, bold lettering and single landscape of the parks series made them the best-known American poster style of the century.
Printed whole, at the poster's own ratio
A WPA poster is rarely a neat 2:3. Most are nearer 3:4 and the rest vary, so we print each one at its own proportion, full-bleed, on the size ladder that fits it (12×16, 18×24 and 24×32 for the 3:4 posters; 12×18, 16×24 and 24×36 for the narrower ones) rather than cropping the title or floating the poster on a white mount. Where the Library's scan is small we cap the sizes at what it honestly supports, which is why a few posters stop at 12×16 or 18×24. Each is restored from the Library of Congress file: scanner board and calibration strips removed, colour balanced to the original ink, nothing redrawn.
National parks, See America, zoos and cities
The set falls into a few families. The national park posters: Grand Canyon, Zion, Yellowstone's Old Faithful, Lassen Volcanic, Fort Marion, Pueblos of the Southwest, plus the Preserve Wild Life and Don't Kill Our Wild Life conservation series. The See America campaign: the Southwest arch, Carlsbad Caverns, the waterfall, Welcome to Montana. The zoo and museum posters: Philadelphia's hippopotamus and penguins, the aquarium jellyfish, the American Museum of Natural History. And the city and state posters: Buckingham Fountain and the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, New York's municipal airports, Philadelphia's Carpenters' Hall and Old Swedes Church, Sea Cliff on Long Island, rural Pennsylvania and Puerto Rico. The retro park prints drawn in-house (Yosemite, Zion, Yellowstone, Glacier, Arches, Acadia and more) sit with the originals on the national park page.
Where they hang
A WPA poster is graphic enough to carry a hallway or a cabin wall on its own at 18×24, and a row of three parks in the same frame is the classic arrangement for a mudroom or a study. Printed to order on heavyweight matte paper, unframed or framed in black or dark wood, with free standard shipping; three or more prints take 10% off automatically.