THE PAN AM POSTER ARCHIVE
About Our Vintage Pan Am Posters
About This Website
This website was created to fill a void for collectors and enthusiasts of vintage Pan Am posters. These posters have a passionate following and are regularly bought and sold at poster galleries and auction houses in the U.S. and around the world. Judging by increasing prices for vintage travel posters, interest and demand are growing strongly. With this demand, it’s not surprising that many articles and books include information on Pan Am posters. That said, until now, there has not been a complete catalog of all known Pan Am posters.
Why This Archive Exists
As a collector of vintage Pan Am posters, I found this gap frustrating. If I collected stamps, coins, baseball cards, or cars, I could easily analyze my collection within the context of other collections and all known items within the collecting world. That was not the case with Pan Am posters. 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.
My Journey with Vintage Pan Am Posters
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 was the striking Pelé 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 Street in New York, just a couple of blocks from the Pan Am Building.
More than 20 years later, while doing international business in five emerging economy countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and Turkey), I remembered that Pan Am Pelé poster and thought it would be fun to decorate my office with vintage travel posters representing each of my work countries. Since Pan Am flew almost everywhere (except Antarctica—and there’s even a poster for that!), I began hunting down Pan Am posters for each of those countries. The search was both challenging and exciting, sparking my deep interest in collecting vintage Pan Am posters.
Building the Most Complete Vintage Pan Am Poster Archive
My collecting has taken two directions:
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Expanding My Collection – Over the years, I have added many more posters to my physical collection, allowing me to assemble an extensive digital image gallery of vintage Pan Am posters.
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Creating a Comprehensive Catalog – Over the last 10+ years, I have scoured 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 presented here is the culmination of this effort—a resource for all to enjoy and reference.
Help Grow the Archive
If you know of a Pan Am poster that is not captured on this website, please contribute! Send an email with the poster image and any known details to info@panamposters.com. Your help in expanding this archive is greatly appreciated.