ABOUT THIS SITE

This website is an independent archival and research project based on a private collection of vintage Pan Am posters. The site aims to document and preserve the history of vintage Pan Am travel posters and related graphic art. The site is not operated by or affiliated with Pan American World Airways, LLC.

We created this website to fill a void for collectors and enthusiasts of Pan Am posters. Original Pan Am posters have a passionate following and are regularly bought and sold at poster galleries and auction houses in the US and around the world. Judging by increasing prices for vintage travel posters, interest and demand is growing strongly. Given this demand and interest, one can find many articles and books that include information on Pan Am posters. That said, until now, one could not find a complete catalog of all known Pan Am posters.​

For collectors of Pan Am posters, this gap was frustrating. Collectors of stamps, coins, baseball cards, or cars can easily find authoritative catalogs or archives to help analyze their collections within the context of other collections, and all known items within the collecting world. That was not the case with Pan Am posters, so this website is an attempt to build and maintain the world’s most complete catalog of known Pan Am posters, and to make this resource available to all vintage poster collectors and fans of Pan Am.

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I worked for Pan Am as a marketing intern at the Pan Am building in New York in 1985. The first Pan Am poster I distinctly remember seeing is the striking Pele poster from 1975 … no country, no text, just an iconic photograph of the Brazilian soccer legend and the Pan Am logo. What a great poster! It was proudly displayed on the wall of a Brazilian restaurant on 46th St. in New York, just a couple of blocks from the Pan Am building.

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More than 20 years later, I was doing international business in five emerging economy countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and Turkey) and I remembered back to that Pan Am Pele poster and thought it would be fun to decorate my office with vintage travel posters for each of my work countries. Since Pan Am flew everywhere (except Antarctica, and there’s a poster for that!), I hunted down Pan Am posters for each of those countries. It took a while, the hunt was interesting and fun, and that sparked my interest in collecting Pan Am posters.

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My collecting has taken two directions. First, I have added many more posters to my physical collection which has allowed me to assemble an extensive digital image gallery of Pan Am posters. Second, and fundamental for this website, over the last 15+ years I have scoured many printed resources and the far reaches of the internet to supplement the images from my physical collection and develop a (near) complete inventory of all known Pan Am posters. The Pan Am Poster Archive is the culmination of this work and is presented here for all to enjoy and reference.

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My research has been helped by several websites, books and vintage poster auction catalogs including:

• The Simmonds Collection, a fantastic private collection of 1,272 rare vintage travel posters assembled and curated by retired pilot Jon Simmonds. This collection stands alone for quality, quantity, rarity and breadth, with posters from many airlines, large and small, with dates ranging from the earliest commercial aviation posters in 1919 into the "jet set" age in the 1960s.

• The National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian, has a comprehensive collection of artifacts related to air and space travel, including a poster collection with many vintage travel posters.

• Aviation Museum and Library at the SFO Museum has a great collection and exhibits tracking the develop and growth of commercial aviation with a focus on San Francisco and west coast travel. With SFO being Pan Am's west coast hub and starting point for Pan Am Pacific routes, Pan Am is well represented in the collection.

• Pan Am: History, Design & Identity by Matthias C. Huhne. This is a superb, large-format coffee table book that chronicles the rise and fall of Pan Am with a comprehensive study of Pan Am's visual identity over the full course of its corporate life. The book features an impressive selection of vintage Pan Am posters.

• Auction houses that specialize in vintage travel posters including Swann Auction Galleries, Potter & Potter Auctions, Poster Auctions International, PosterConnection, and eBay.

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Please help with this effort! If you know of a Pan Am poster that is not captured on this website, please send an email with the poster image and any known information about the poster to info@panamposters.com.