Staff Book and Media Recommendations

Patrick Douglas is a Library Technician at the University of Central Oklahoma.

War Posters: Weapons of Mass Communication

James Aulich

While Aulich's War Posters: Weapons of Mass Communication contains posters of many nations in many languages, the book is a British publication and is primarily concerned with Britain's participation in recent wars and social movements. Covering materials from the First World War to the present, this book explores a variety of posters "concerning propaganda, publicity, and advertising, in relation to the media and morality."

Less concerned with beauty than the "broader visual environment of daily experience," Aulich follows the collection of J.R. Bradley and the Imperial War Museum. The posters, chosen from the largest and most comprehensive collection of its kind in the world, are selected primarily for their diversity and intended impact on local, regional, and national populations.

War Posters is divided into five chapters: The poster, propaganda, and publicity; The First World War; Interwar Europe; The Second World War; and The Cold War and the New World Order. Each chapter is divided into sections contrasting the styles of different nations, ideologies, movements, historic periods, and artistic visions. With more than three hundred plates, War Posters is more than a coffee-table book; it is a serious look at history through the eyes of those who used posters as a method of influencing the masses. It is text over the poster as an "autonomous medium."

Reviewed October 2011