The WPA & the Golden Age · Reading & the Stage
Don't gum up a book
Arlington Gregg · Works Progress Administration poster, 1936
What it is
A silkscreen poster designed by Arlington Gregg for the Works Progress Administration, showing a boy clambering across a splayed-open book with gummed-up hands and feet. The Library of Congress dates it to the 1936-1940 WPA years rather than a single year.
Why it matters
This is one of the WPA's library-care posters, made to teach reading-room manners to the crowds passing through Depression-era public libraries. Gregg skips the lecture and hands the warning to a child's logic — the mess does the arguing, so a kid can read it before he can read the words. It belongs to a moment when government put artists to work making civic instruction that had to carry across a room on the cheap.
What to notice
Look at how flat blocks of color sit inside heavy black outlines — the silkscreen tell that let the image stay legible from clear across a reading room.
Good behavior, argued in glue and footprints.
Provenance
- School
- WPA — Federal Art Project (United States)
- Designer
- Arlington Gregg
- Format
- Exhibition poster
- Poster published
- Works Progress Administration poster, 1936
- Source
- Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division · LCCN 2011645391
Rights: CLEAR. Public domain — U.S. government program work (WPA Federal Art Project), any year. Gated by the poster’s own publication year. Cleared by registry on 2026-07-18.
Format
The full-resolution, color-managed file — restored honestly, yours to print and keep.
Sized to protect print quality — this scan supports sizes up to 24x36" cleanly.
Size
$29.00
