About Our Vintage Pan Am Posters

About This Website
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.

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. 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.

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Why This Archive Exists

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.

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 Collection and Image Archive
My collecting has taken two directions:

Expanding My Collection – Over the years, I have added many posters to my physical collection, allowing me to assemble an extensive digital image gallery of vintage Pan Am posters.
Creating a Comprehensive Catalog – Over the last 15+ years, I have scoured printed resources and the far reaches of the internet to supplement the images from my physical collection and develop this (near) complete digital archive 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.

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.

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.