The Art of Wanderlust

They weren’t meant to be valuable. Sweaty workers in greasy overalls would plaster them on the walls of train stations, covering the ones they’d plastered up a few weeks earlier. Travel agencies pinned them up for a month or so before trashing and replacing them with the next one. Which explains why so few original examples of vintage travel posters — originally printed in runs of several thousand — managed to survive. And why they’re such valuable collector’s items today.

Designed to sell and romanticize ships and trains and planes and destinations, travel posters reached a heyday of sorts during the 1930s, when their glamour and elegance tried to suggest the world wasn’t falling apart. After the war, in the 1940s and ’50s, they were produced to convince leery flyers that airplanes were not only stylish, but safe.

Not until the 1960s did they sport photographs. Travel posters from the 1890s on were always painted, many by prominent artists like Victor Vasarely and Salvador Dalí. Others were made by artists like A. M. Cassandre, Paul Colin, and Abram Games, who achieved their fame precisely because of the gorgeousness of their posters.

Arguably, the most fabulous travel poster of all time is Cassandre’s 1935 depiction of France’s ultimate liner, the SS Normandie. The ship’s giant bow takes center stage, its superstructure and smokestacks plonked above almost as an afterthought. A flock of tiny seagulls underscore the liner’s enormity. And it is all set off by hand-drawn Art Deco type. It was Cassandre’s work, more than that of any artist since Toulouse-Lautrec, that transformed mere “advertising” into “art.”

I was a travel-crazed London teenager when I started revering and collecting travel posters. In the 1960s, I would haunt Piccadilly’s airline and tourist offices begging for discards. I hung them in my room and salivated over them while poring over airline timetables and Michelin guides. Soon after I moved to New York in 1973, browsing one day in Fifth Avenue’s sadly departed Brentano’s bookstore, I came upon a sale of original vintage travel posters. It was a moment both eclectic and electric. I was able to afford two: One, from around 1920, depicts the Italian resort of Sanremo. Another, from 1950 (a mere 23 years before I bought it), sports silhouettes of orange Air France planes circling a blue globe. More than five decades later I’ve amassed more than 150 original travel posters. Many, like “Sanremo,” are framed at home. Many others decorate my company’s office in a fittingly evocative Art Deco skyscraper in Manhattan. Many remain rolled in tubes. Sadly, I’ve never been able to afford a Cassandre.

In 2025, one of the best places to buy original vintage travel posters is eBay. But back in the 1970s, I’d spend hours leafing through piles of posters in an odd mezzanine gallery at the back of an antique store on then-dodgy Columbus Avenue on the Upper West Side. The gallery owner was named Phillip Williams. A half century later, strolling Chambers Street in downtown Manhattan, I spied a store: Phillip Williams Posters. Inside, I encountered vast walls covered with vast posters. I introduced myself to a man I hadn’t seen for 50 years. I don’t think he remembered me. But there he is still, surrounded by immense, valuable stacks of vintage posters — probably 20,000 or more. Like my home, like my office, it’s a shrine to an art form that is a glorious reminder of that uniquely 20th-century vogue.

Geoffrey Weill is the founder and president of Geoffrey Weill Associates, a luxury travel public relations firm, and the author of a memoir, All Abroad, published in 2021. He lives in New Jersey.