Hitting the Road: The Art of the American Road Map
Get your kicksandRoute 66 in this brightly designed album of artwork from road maps printed by oil companies; you remember those freebies Texaco and its ilk gave away as promotional literature at their stations until the 1960s, when the interstates extinguished the custom. They've since become valuable collectibles, and in over 200 pictures, Yorke resurrects their exuberant visual appeal over the years of creation and distribution. The authors underscore the commercial purpose of the artwork, which was to entice motorists to travel, and they responded en masse in the 1920s. The artwork itself metamorphosed over the decades, beginning as bucolic depictions of countryside driving, giving way in the 1930s to angular scenes of industrial progress and world's fairs, and tailing off during the 1950s into prosaic corporate symbols appropriate to the "nomads of the nuclear age." Pleasant nostalgia apt to inspire its viewers to search their own attics.Gilbert Taylor