Customer Reviews

Billboards of the Past

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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.

I ordered this in hopes to get some good billboard pictures I could use on my model railroad layout. This is chalked full, 300-400, 3 inch by 6 inch photographs of billboards from the 1940's to 1960's. Included in the prologue are some interesting stories of how the author got into the hobby and obtained the photographing opportunities. He obviously put a lot of work into it. I plan on buying a 2nd copy so I can break the pages out.

Striking billboard ads from 1945 through 1967 are presented in over four hundred color photos to celebrate all kinds of cultural memories of the past, from political ads to products ranging from Coke to cigarettes. Real billboards were stored in their boxes for decades before being assembled and photographed for Billboards of the Past: a price guide of values rounds out supporting collector's tips on assembling, displaying and storing such vintage billboards. Specialty collectors with a focus on American popular culture memorabilia must add this to their libraries!