Posters: A Concise History

World of Art

by John Barnicoat

Studies the artists and movements that have shaped and influenced the development of poster design during a one-hundred-year period

Genres: Art, Nonfiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1985

Reviews

[pher]

The composition of this book it’s quiet a mess

[Apoorva Bhide]

Some books are disappointing for the books they could’ve been. This is one of them.
Posters are an art form that straddles so many different worlds: they are art but they’re also trying to communicate specific information, they have been used in so many bottom-up and top-down ways, they’ve gone through such an evolution since artists made them once upon a time to graphic designers being specialised now, they’re art and have been made by artists and yet supposed to appeal to the masses and be used directly for commerce…
This book hints at all of these things, and it shows you many examples of posters from about a hundred years. And the author has enough of a background here that they could in theory do this history so much justice!
But it fails to actually give any of those themes any kind of discussion at all. Until the last chapter, the book felt like an absolute blur of names, until they all started sounding like the same to me. It does only really one thing correctly, which is reprinting enough examples of every style of poster you can think of (I wouldn’t have made it ten pages through a dryly written history of such an interesting topic without graphics).

[Rodger Stanier]

Oh dear, what a dreary read. I love posters and am inspired by them specially the brilliants adverts over the last 50 years but his boring style and factual time lines just sent me to sleep
Admittedly some of the posters were interesting but dogged facts just drove me to skim reading
I was going to suggest a huge update but John has passed away, and to be honest it would ve better to start again from scratch.
I don’t like to speak ill of the dead so let me finish by congratulating him on completing such as massive body of research.

[Igor]

I read the edition from Thames & Hudson world of art. A book about posters in black and white pages? Come on. The writing style is so boring and confusing, I had to search through the Internet to get a better description of some of the art styles. The layout and the organization of the text and the images is so confusing. Disappointing.

[Agus]

Me generó mucha desesperación la arbitrariedad cronológica con la que están dispuestas las imágenes (cabe la pena destacar que son el 50% del libro), me hacía tener que avanzar y retroceder constantemente, dificultando la lectura. Más allá de eso, está bueno. Una línea de tiempo no viene mal.

[Cliff Poche]

Really liked some of the poster designs!

[Huguette Larochelle]

the history of posters.

[Jennpants]

A concise history of BORING. You won't hear me say this often, but thank god for the pictures.

[Neva]

This book is such a slog. It's like reading someone's badly written thesis. Only redeeming quality is the reproductions.