Advertisers in the nineteenth and early twentieth century pushed the boundaries of printing, manipulated language, inspired a new form of art and exploited many formats, including calendars, bookmarks and games. This collection of essays examines the extent to which these standalone advertisements – which have survived by chance and are now divorced from their original purpose – provide information not just on the sometimes bizarre products being sold, but also on class, gender, Britishness, war, fashion and shopping. Starting with the genesis of an advertisement through the creation of text, image, print and format, the authors go on to examine the changing profile of the consumer, notably the rise of the middle classes, and the way in which manufacturers and retailers identified and targeted their markets. Finally, they look at advertisements as documents that both reveal and conceal details about society, politics and local history. Copiously illustrated from the world-renowned John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera and featuring work by influential illustrators John Hassall and Dudley Hardy, this attractive book invites us to consider both the intended and unintended messages of the advertisements of the past.

On February 2, 1968, the Electric Factory, Philadelphia's first major venue for the era's new music, opened with a show featuring the Chambers Brothers. Performing their neosoul and gospel sounds in a warm and inviting venue, they declared, "My soul's been psychedelicized!"-a feeling that the Factory's cofounder, Larry Magid, has been experiencing ever since.

In My Soul's Been Psychedelicized, Magid presents a spectacular photographic history of the bands and solo acts that have performed at the Electric Factory and at other venues in Factory-produced concerts over the past four decades. The book includes concert posters, photographs, and promotional items featuring both rising stars and established performers, such as Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Bette Midler, Elvis Presley, Tina Turner, Pearl Jam and many, many more.

The images—candid and celebratory—create a one-of-a-kind history of rock and roll, from the wild 1960s to the Live Aid concert in 1985 and the closing of the Philadelphia Spectrum in 2009. Magid's vivid recollections constitute a who's who of pop music and culture. As one of the great concert producers, he shares his unique perspective on the business, talking about how it has changed and how lasting careers have been carefully developed.

For anyone who has ever attended a concert at the Electric Factory—or for anyone who missed a show—My Soul's Been Psychedelicized will bring back great memories of the music and the musicians.

Poetries – Politics: A Celebration of Language, Art, and Learning celebrates the best of innovative humanities pedagogy and creative graphic design. Designed and implemented during a time of political divisiveness, the Poetries – Politics project created a space of inviting, multilingual walls on the Rutgers campus, celebrating diversity, community, and cross-cultural exchange. This book, like the original project, provides a platform for the incredible generative power of student-led work. Essays feature the perspectives of three students and professors originally involved in the project, reflecting on their learning and exploring the works they selected for the original exhibition. The essays lead to a beautifully illustrated catalogue of the original student designs.

Reproduced in full color and with the accompanying poems in both their original language and a translation, this catalogue commemorates the incredible creative spirit of the project and provides a new way of contemplating these great poetic works.

The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design, and Collecting, 1860s–1900s is a cultural history that situates the poster at the crossroads of art, design, advertising, and collecting. Though international in scope, the book focuses especially on France and England. Ruth E. Iskin argues that the avant-garde poster and the original art print played an important role in the development of a modernist language of art in the 1890s, as well as in the adaptation of art to an era of mass media. She moreover contends that this new form of visual communication fundamentally redefined relations between word and image: poster designers embedded words within the graphic, rather than using images to illustrate a text. Posters had to function as effective advertising in the hectic environment of the urban street. Even though initially commissioned as advertisements, they were soon coveted by collectors. Iskin introduces readers to the late nineteenth-century “iconophile”—a new type of collector/curator/archivist who discovered in poster collecting an ephemeral archaeology of modernity. Bridging the separation between the fields of art, design, advertising, and collecting, Iskin’s insightful study proposes that the poster played a constitutive role in the modern culture of spectacle. This stunningly illustrated book will appeal to art historians and students of visual culture, as well as social and cultural history, media, design, and advertising.

From band posters stapled to telephone poles to the advertisements hanging at bus shelters to the inspirational prints that adorn office walls, posters surround us everywhere—but do we know how they began? Telling the story of this ephemeral art form, Elizabeth E. Guffey reexamines the poster’s roots in the nineteenth century and explores the relevance they still possess in the age of digital media. Even in our world of social media and electronic devices, she argues, few forms of graphic design can rival posters for sheer spatial presence, and they provide new opportunities to communicate across public spaces in cities around the globe.
           
Guffey charts the rise of the poster from the revolutionary lithographs that papered nineteenth-century London and Paris to twentieth-century works of propaganda, advertising, pop culture, and protest. Examining contemporary examples, she discusses Palestinian martyr posters and West African posters that describe voodoo activities or Internet con men, stopping along the way to uncover a rich variety of posters from the Soviet Union, China, the United States, and more. Featuring 150 stunning images, this illuminating book delivers a fresh look at the poster and offers revealing insights into the designs and practices of our twenty-first-century world.