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

Rating:
Summary: Stuck-up trains.
Review: 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, 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' by Lynn Johnson (ISBN 0811817474) 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' by Beverly Cole and Richard Durack (ISBN 1856690148) with over two hundred illustrations in a well designed book.