Lawrence University Digital Collections would like to announce a new collection of digital images available through CONTENTdm: The Art of the Poster 1880-1918.
In the late nineteenth century, lithographers began to use mass-produced zinc plates rather than stones in their printing process. This innovation allowed them to prepare multiple plates, each with a different color ink, and to print these with close registration on the same sheet of paper. Posters in a range of colors and variety of sizes could now be produced quickly, at modest cost. Skilled illustrators and graphic designers – such as Alphonse Mucha, Jules Cheret, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec — quickly began to exploit this new technology; the “Golden Age of the Poster” (1880s through the First World War) was the spectacular result. This collection of 162 posters are all in the public domain under United States Copyright Law, and are downloadable.
The Lawrence University Digital Image Collections are hosting the scanned images for the Art of the Poster collection in collaboration with the Visual Resources Library at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design where the images were scanned and cataloged.
You can view the collection at:
http://www.lawrence.edu/library/contentdm/posters/index.htm