THE VINTAGE POSTER - Interview with Philip Williams

Philip Williams is the prolific collector and director of Philip Williams Posters, founded in 1973. His Tribeca gallery, located on Chambers Street, is the largest vintage poster gallery in the world with over 100,000 unique posters dating from 1870 to the present. The Tribeca brick-and-mortar storefront is supplemented with an online platform, PosterMuseum.com, which contains some 26,000 posters.

In this episode, Philip Williams tells fascinating stories cultivated from over 40 years of collecting vintage posters and details how it all started, after finding letters from aviation pioneer Orville Wright in an abandoned suitcase. 

We also learn about the poster as cultural artifact: From the first golden age of the vintage poster in the late 19th century driven by innovative printing techniques and emerging mass markets; to the second golden age in the mid 1960s, where posters were repurposed as countercultural protest; to its use today, as a staple in contemporary interior design