Book Review: 60 Great WPA Posters Platinum DVD and Book

Telling the people

The sixty posters in this soft cover book are a small selection of the nine hundred in the Library of Congress. The idea behind them was simple: to promote the ideals of America during the Depression years (and into the early forties) with simple, inexpensive posters that could be used anywhere. They were not billboards but mostly twenty-two by fourteen inches and printed by silk-screen and in their millions, too.

The book has posters for National Parks; Health; Education; Culture; Tourism; Recruitment and Wartime messages. The selection only give a rather subdued look at the whole range of WPA posters and I was disappointed that there was nothing by Vera Bock who designed some wonderful whimsical artwork or something from Richard Floethe who had a distinctive graphic style for his posters.

To really appreciate how wonderful the creative work of the hundreds of artists and designers who were employed to turn out these simple messages you'll need to look at Posters of the WPA and Posters for the People: The Art of the WPA. The first has 280 in color and the second 500 in color. '60 Great WPA posters' seems to miss out on so many really vibrant striking designs that you'll see in these two books.

The Dover book has the posters on a CD-ROM so you can pull them up on your pc in perfect detail but I wonder why this was done. This poster art is not really usable for anything unlike a disc of alphabets or clip-art that could be used for various projects.

60 Great WPA Posters Platinum DVD and Book (Dover Electronic Clip Art) is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | FR | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

60 Great WPA Posters Platinum DVD and Book - 01
Two other books that give a comprehensive look at the WPA posters, both beautifully designed as well.