Print Collection 12: WWI Printed Media and Art

The World War I Printed Media and Art Collection contains over one thousand prints, propaganda posters, postcards, trench newspapers, maps, broadsides and original artworks dating from 1914 to 1931 and offers an enormous range of perspectives on the First World War.

Popular art in the form of prints, postcards and several original cartoons by over fifty different artists forms the base of the collection. Printed publications include pamphlets, periodicals and over one hundred trench newspapers. Government and military broadsides from France and Belgium reveal a story of struggle and occupation, while propaganda posters from four nations tell an official narrative of war through one of history's largest public information campaigns. Though primarily French, the collection also includes materials from Belgium, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada.

The collection owes some of its most important pieces to Captain R. Norris Williams II, whose wife donated his collection of World War I books, documents, and ephemera to the library in 1987. Most of the four hundred and fifty postcards in the collection were a gift of the Houston family as part of the estate of Mrs. Eleanor Houston Smith.