The WPA & the Golden Age · Reading & the Stage
Rain is bad for a book!
Arlington Gregg · Works Progress Administration poster, 1936
What it is
A silkscreen poster by Arlington Gregg for the Works Progress Administration, dated 1936. A boy shelters under an umbrella while an open book takes the rain beneath him.
Why it matters
The WPA's Federal Art Project put artists to work through the Depression, and among their jobs was making the public library legible and inviting to ordinary readers. This is a care-of-books notice turned into a single joke: the boy protects himself and dooms the book, so you don't forget the point. It belongs to a whole run of hand-pulled library posters that treated a civic instruction as something worth drawing well.
What to notice
The color sits in flat, unmodulated planes with no shading or gradient — the tell of a hand-pulled screen built for short runs, one solid layer at a time.
The lesson lands because the boy gets it exactly backward.
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 2011645390
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
