Customer Reviews

Travel by Train: The American Railroad Poster, 1870-1950

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The American railroads sold their services using posters but had a problem deciding what should be shown. European train posters mostly favored showing the end destination rather than the American graphic idea of showing the train. The first few posters shown in this beautiful book are a mixture of route maps, flamboyant lettering and illustrations of trains, sometimes all on the same poster, too.

Santa Fe, to my mind, really kicked off the great railroad poster by using the talented Louis Treviso and Oscar Bryn. They both produced knockout, straightforward graphic solutions, with bold colors and strong typography, clearly influenced by the leading European poster artists like Ludwig Hohlwein, Lucian Bernhard and the Beggarstaff Brothers. Into the twenties Santa Fe used Sam Hyde Harris to continue the trend in strong graphics. Southern Pacific used Maurice Logan to design equally powerful posters, page sixty-two has a stunning Logan graphic of two trains selling the Great Salt Lake.

Other artists and designers who get a good showing are Hernando Villa, who developed the memorable Indian's head for Santa Fe, Leslie Ragan for the New York Central (he has the most illustrations in the book) Sascha Maurer for the Pennsylvania Railroad and many artists who have one or two works shown. The authors combine all these creative folk and the way their output was used by the rail and ad industries up to the Fifties.

I thought the book was very well produced, though the caption typography is rather fussy, using the rather old fashioned Fig.33 and then capital directions in brackets (FACING PAGE TOP LEFT) in every case there is enough space to put the caption below each poster. The back of the book has a bibliography and index.

This is probably the best (and only) title about American railroad posters, some good work is shown in All Aboard!: Images from the Golden Age of Rail Travel, by Lynn Johnson which also covers general railroad graphics. European travel posters have had plenty of coverage and I can recommend a really super book of British work Railway Posters 1923-1947: From the Collection of the National Railway Museum, York, England, by Beverly Cole and Richard Durack with over two hundred illustrations in a well designed book.

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover,

We came across posters that we had not seen elsewhere in this book. Great documentary for a bygone era and the prints are excellent.

Well written, well assembled, beautiful reproductions of the posters. I bought it for the Leslie Ragan images (there are more than a dozen!) but discovered much more. I appreciated that no picture takes up more than a page (it's always distracting when pictures get spread across two pages). In the writing, I would have preferred more about some of the actual trains and less about advertising history. But the writing is informative and clear.

I love trains, and I was born just a little too late to have enjoyed the last great decade of train travel (I was 15 when Amtrak was formed).

So it's great to live that era vicariously through books like this. The presentation of the posters is top-notch, as are the bios of the artists and the descriptions of the processes by which certain posters were created. Not a complete documentation, but a vital part of any railroad library.

Length:: 0:11 Mins

So I went out and bought my first print from NelsonArtWorks.net? So waddaya think?