are often about one-twelfth the size of the originals, and the limit in size may perhaps be considered to detract from the value of the reproductions. This, however, has been considered, as far as possible, in selecting the examples chosen. A strong, impulsive design does not depend entirely upon size for the force of its appeal, nor does it change in character from being reduced; but a poster badly designed, though passable on a large scale, may be an unintelligible jumble in a small illustration. In many cases a design is knit together by its reduction, and so viewed as a whole more compactly. Its publication in book form gives it also a permanence and ultimately a wider audience than the original can hope to gain.

This thought of the ephemeral character of the poster as such has, in the first instance, prompted the publication of this volume. A poster serving the purposes of a war, even of such a world cataclysm as that during which we have passed during the last five years, is by its nature a creation of the moment, its business being to seize an opportunity as it passes, to force a sentiment into a great passion, to answer an immediate need, or to illuminate an episode which may be forgotten in the tremendous sequence of a few days’ events. In its brief existence the poster is battered by the rain or faded by the sun, then pasted over with another message more urgent still. Save for the very limited number of copies that wise collectors have preserved, the actual posters of the Great War will be lost and forgotten in fifty years.

But we must not forget that in every country concerned the poster played its part as an essential munition of war. Look through any collection of them, and you will see portrayed, in picture and in legend, which he who runs may read, the whole history of the Great War in its political and economical aspects. The posters of 1914-1918 illustrate every phase and difficulty and movement—recruiting for naval, military, and air forces; munition works; war loans; hospitals; Red Cross; Y.M.C.A.; Church Army; food economy; land cultivation; women’s work of many kinds; prisoners’ aid—and hundreds of problems and activities in connection with the country’s needs. The same sequence of needs can be traced in the posters of Germany and Austria, where a stress even greater than our own is revealed, not merely in the urgent appeals for contributions to war loans, but in the sale by German women of their jewels and their hair.

For obvious reasons only a limited number of the posters could be reproduced in colour, the main portion of the plates in the book being in black and white. But since the primary element counting for success in the poster is design, it follows that excellent colouring will not save a badly-designed poster from failure, however much it enhances the power of one already successful. Indeed, we may go further and claim that ineffective or quite bad colouring often fails to mar entirely the success of a good design. The examples selected are not heavy losers by being reproduced mostly in monotone; for they are essentially posters depending on design and not merely pictorial advertisements. Their purpose is innate in their structure; they have their story to tell and message to deliver; it is their business to waylay and hold the passer-by, and to impose their meaning upon him. The best of them have done this brilliantly.

II.—GREAT BRITAIN

Shortly after the War began, an “Exhibition of German and Austrian Articles typifying Design” was arranged at the Goldsmiths’ Hall, to show the directions in which we had lessons to learn from German trade-competitors as to the combination of Art and economy applied to ordinary articles of commerce. The walls were hung with German posters, and one felt at once that while our average poster cost perhaps six times as much to produce, it was inferior to its German rival in just those vital qualities of concentrated design, whether of colour or form, and those powers of seizing attention, which are essential to the very nature of a poster.

While we have had individual poster artists, such as Nicholson, Pryde, and Beardsley, whose work has touched perhaps a higher level than has ever been reached on the Continent, our general conception of what is good and valuable in a poster has been almost entirely wrong. The advertising agent and the business firm rarely get away from the popular idea that a poster must be a picture, and that the purpose of every picture is to “point a moral and adorn a tale.” They seldom realise that poster art and pictorial art have essentially different aims. If a British firm wishes to advertise beer, it insists on an artist producing a picture of a publican’s brawny and veined arm holding out a pot of beer during closed hours to a policeman; or a Gargantuan bottle towering above the houses and dense crowds of a market-place; or a fox-terrier climbing on to a table and wondering what it is “master likes so much”—all in posters produced at great expense with an enormous range of colour. The German, on the other hand—there was an example at the Goldsmiths’ Hall—designs a single pot of amber, foaming beer, with the name of the firm in one good spot of lettering below. It is printed at small cost, in two or three flat colours; but it shouts “beer” at the passer-by. It would make even Mr. Pussyfoot thirsty to glance at it.

Our British love for a story in a picture has accounted for an immense amount of ingenious artistry falling into amorphous ineffectiveness. It is the essence of the poster that it should compel attention; grip by an instantaneous appeal; hit out, as it were, with a straight left. It must convey an idea rather than a story. From its very nature it must be simple, not complex, in its methods. If it has something eccentric or bizarre about it, so long as it is good in design, that is a good quality rather than a fault. Even about the best of our war posters one feels that they are too often enlarged drawings, excellent as lithographs to preserve in a collector’s portfolio, but ineffective when valued in relation to the essential services that a poster is required to render. We must regretfully admit that when it comes to choosing illustrations for a volume such as this on their merits as posters, not as pictures, it is difficult not to give a totally disproportionate space to posters made in Germany.

Our British war posters are too well known and too recent in our memory to require any lengthy introduction or comment. The first official recognition of their value to the nation was during the recruiting campaign which began towards the close of 1914. The Parliamentary Recruiting Committee gave commissions for more than a hundred posters, of which two and a half million copies were distributed throughout the British Isles. We hope it is not true that, in their wisdom and aloofness, they refused the offer of a free gift of a six-sheet poster by Mr. Frank Brangwyn, R.A. It is, at any rate, certain that they possessed a poor degree of artistic perception, and, added to this, a very low notion of the mentality of the British public. Hardly one of the early posters had the slightest claim to recognition as a product of fine art; most of them were examples of what any art school would teach should be avoided in crude design and atrocious lettering. Among the best and most efficient, however, may be mentioned Alfred Leete’s “Kitchener.” But if one compares Leete’s head of Kitchener, “Your Country Needs You,” with Louis Oppenheim’s “Hindenburg,” the latter, with its rugged force and reserve of colour, stands as an