Take a trip through time, along the highways of yesteryear, as you view striking billboard ads from 1945 through 1967, captured here in over 450 beautiful color photos. Among the ads, you will see Jack Benny and Betty Grable selling Mercury automobiles, Arthur Godfrey and Joe Dimaggio hawking Chesterfield cigarettes, and Edgar Bergen, Charley McCarthy, and Santa Claus promoting Coca Cola. Billboard ads for everything from appliances to tractors and beer to war bonds are displayed. The artwork of many recognized lithographic artists is captured here, including the work of Howard Scott, Morice Logan, Jerome Razen, Stu Graves, and even Charles Schultz of Peanuts*R comic strip fame. This is a treasure trove of American advertising gathered from actual billboards that were carefully stored in their boxes for several decades, before being assembled and photographed for this book. The informative text provides useful instructions on assembling, displaying, and safely storing vintage billboards. Values are provided in the captions.
Reader Reviews
Randy Littlefield came across this treasure trove of billboards way back in 1982 and having spent some years organizing the collection this book is the result. The 450 included certainly are colorful as you flip through the pages. The problem is that, having looked through the book several times, it very quickly gets boring. Hardly any of the billboards are of any particular design or art merit and they are all mostly presented three to a page in a very repetitive layout. Amongst all the blandly designed twelve sheets (the most common billboard ad size of 19.5 feet by 8.5 deep uses twelve pieces) there were some that caught my eye: Betty Grable for Mercury cars in 1950 with her head probably seven foot deep, a few for Richfield gas that used space theme illustrations for their slogan `Years Ahead'. There are twenty-three pages of Coke billboards which, of course, always look a treat, especially the Haddon Sundblom Santa ones. There is a rather annoying problem with so many of the billboards though, because they weren't actually photographed stuck on a billboard but unfolded and positioned on an indoor flat surface and then photographed you can see fold marks everywhere. With a bit of effort a lot of these could have been PhotoShopped out to present an almost pristine poster. The billboards capture a little bit of fifties nostalgia and the book might be of interest to model train folk who want some period posters for their town dioramas, it would be easy to photocopy and print them to the required size. For anyone else I thought this was a rather expensive look back to the past.
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