Vintage food propaganda from the American government.
vintage
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Gorgeous vintage map of the Moscow metro, 1980. Pair with Transit Maps of the World.
The Cat-Hater’s Handbook – a subversive vintage compendium of playful anti-feline verses by William Faulkner, Mark Twain, Shel Silverstein, and others, illustrated by the great Tomi Ungerer.
Wheels of Change – for National Bike to Work Day, a brief visual history of how the bicycle emancipated women.
Preliminary drawing (top) for 1950 comic strip adaptation (bottom) of Orwell’s Animal Farm, used by various embassies as anti-communist propaganda.
Pair with The Art of War adapted as a comic and The Graphic Canon, the fantastic anthology of comic adaptations of literary classics.
The early-20th-century photo of French boxers that inspired this new gem from Sophie Blackall, one of the finest illustrators working today.
Also see Blackall on creativity and the secrets of subversive storytelling.
Cats may be famous literary pets, but who knew the propaganda art of the anti-suffragist movement had an entire cat-centric sub-genre? As felines represented the domestic sphere and thus the feminine, they were used to portray suffragists as incompetent and unintelligent.
The irony, of course, is that everyone knows how a cat boosts your creativity. For non-believers, there’s always The Cat-Hater’s Handbook, which now carries whole new undertones of misogyny.
Every day is Mother’s Day in Mr. T world!
Complement with words of wisdom from the letters of history’s notable mothers to their children.
Centuries before the ubiquitous Starbucks logo, we had these coffee-house keepers’ tokens of the 17th century, from a history of how coffee changed the world.
We lost the great Maurice Sendak, creator of Where the Wild Things Are, on May 8, 2012 – these are his little-known and lovely vintage Velveteen Rabbit illustrations circa 1960.
For Saul Bass’s birthday, the title sequence for the 1956 adaptation of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days, which one brave Victorian female journalist set out to replicate in real life.
In this 1817 tip sheet for dancers, charmingly minimalist stick figures show you how to perform popular group “country dances” imported to America from England and France.
