[.ca] Billboards of the Past (ISBN 0764324802)

Highway nostalgia:
Randy Littlefield came across this treasure trove of billboards way back in 1982 and having spent some years organizing the collection this book is the result. The 450 included certainly are colorful as you flip through the pages. The problem is that, having looked through the book several times, it very quickly gets boring. Hardly any of the billboards are of any particular design or art merit and they are all mostly presented three to a page in a very repetitive layout. Amongst all the blandly designed twelve sheets (the most common billboard ad size of 19.5 feet by 8.5 deep uses twelve pieces) there were some that caught my eye: Betty Grable for Mercury cars in 1950 with her head probably seven foot deep, a few for Richfield gas that used space theme illustrations for their slogan `Years Ahead'. There are twenty-three pages of Coke billboards which, of course, always look a treat, especially the Haddon Sundblom Santa ones. There is a rather annoying problem with so many of the billboards though, because they weren't actually photographed stuck on a billboard but unfolded and positioned on an indoor flat surface and then photographed you can see fold marks everywhere. With a bit of effort a lot of these could have been PhotoShopped out to present an almost pristine poster. The billboards capture a little bit of fifties nostalgia and the book might be of interest to model train folk who want some period posters for their town dioramas, it would be easy to photocopy and print them to the required size. For anyone else I thought this was a rather expensive look back to the past.