Friday, April 22, 2011

World War II Posters Reviving the Battle Cry-- Part 3

I started this entry back on April 6th.

Owner Vernon Rader recalls a salesman coming into his office and seeing his World War II collection, told him he had a friend with a huge collection of era posters and would he be interested in buying them.

Rader was, a deal was struck and all 346 posters arrived in a big box. Rader had originally offered to pay $30 for them, but when he saw how much postage the man had paid, upped it to $45.

"That was good money for those kinds of posters in the early '60s," Rader says.

Today, World War II posters in good shape can get from $200 to $3,000 according to Carol Leadenham, an archivist at Stanford University's Hoover Institution which possesses 100,000 propaganda posters. Finding posters in that good of a shape is uncommon.

Most of Rader's posters were produced by the Office of War Information (OWI) and all were printed between 1942 to 1945.

I wrote about several OWI photos connected to women working in factories on the home front earlier this month. See "War Production on the Home Front," parts 1-5.

More to Come. --Cooter

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