GLOBE POSTER PRINTING:
A PARTIAL COLLECTION OF SPECIMENS
Joe Galbreath
GD/MFA 2009
Before the digital revolution took over the world of design, some print shops designed and produced their work by hand for a well-inked press. Producing posters, billboards, and even simple handbills required teams of skilled tradespeople. These “job printers” worked directly with clients to visually compose clear, direct messages with short but functional life-spans. Once a common service found in any large city, poster shops have dwindled with the changing cultural and technological landscape leaving only a handful of viable operations: Hatch Show Print in Nashville, Tribune Show Print in Idaville, IN, Triangle Poster in Pittsburgh, Colby Poster in Los Angeles and Globe Poster Printing in Baltimore.
For 80 years, Globe Poster Printing has created street posters, billboards and banners for events across the country. Owned and operated by the Cicero family since 1975, Globe is best known for their R&B show posters and their unflinching use of fluorescent colors. Globe’s work has appeared in Life, Rolling Stone, The Art of Rock and other publications and exhibitions that explore artifacts from Rock N Roll’s early days.
My thesis investigates the forms, artifacts and aesthetics of Globe Poster Printing. For 9 months I have spent time at the shop, organizing and analyzing artifacts, talking with the owners Bob and Frank Cicero, and investigating the visual language of this prolific Baltimore institution.
Globe’s work is well-regarded in the show poster world, so I began by researching their early work from the 50s and 60s. Like many poster shops, Globe did not keep an exhaustive archive, so analysis of these early posters came by way of memorabilia and exhibition catalogs. I focused on three areas of the specimens aesthetics: imprint style, composition and lettering.
The imprint declares the where (venue and city), when (date and time) and how (ticket information) of an event. It prints in an area left blank at the top or bottom of a poster. Globe’s lean and direct imprints embody the philosophy of the shop—be visible and communicate. Globe created and maintained two primary imprint styles: the horizontal imprint stretching from side to side and the two-column imprint terminating in a large, memorable numeral. Globe minimized imprinting enticement language, rarely used redundant time indications like “nite” and rarely indicated the state, when the name of the city would do. They used abbreviations for days and months and excluded unneeded suffixes for dates (-st, -nd, -rd and -th). This relentless pruning resulted in extra space that could comfortably support larger type and therefore be more legible from a distance.
Competition for attention on the streets is hard won. By using graphic devices, color and dynamic compositions to create chunks of information, Globe created layouts that could be quickly scanned by the eye’s of passers-by. Since photos are unidentifiable at a distance, Globe kept them small to allow for larger typeset names. Some performers appreciated this stylistic approach, as each act had its own moment on the poster regardless of popularity. To make each poster stand out from the grey, green and brown backdrop of the urban setting, Globe used of fluorescent inks. Globe continues to employ the bright color’s attention grabbing prowess to this day.
During his nearly 50 years as the in-house designer/artist, Harry Knorr created artwork, graphics and layouts for everything from billboards to posters. Knorr’s hand lettering countered Globe’s wooden typography. Knorr could execute several typefaces by memory and numerous additional styles from reference. To showcase his wide range of skills, a specimen uses Knorr’s show poster work to examine several aspects of lettering.
Following the research phase, the near endless collection of wood type and print blocks served as my next area of concentration. The overwhelming collection of wood type is the dusty jewel in the Globe legacy. The surviving hand-carved and metal plate print blocks monumentalize the vernacular graphics of the shop.
Since there is no formal archive of Globe’s work, and very little written about its collection, much of my research depended on my being in the shop, looking in corners, boxes and drawers. This snooping led to a series of formal studies using the strange and curious elements discovered in and around the composing room where I did most of my work.
Even though Globe stopped letterpressing posters in the late 1980s, they have preserved their entire inventory of wood type. Used for posters, banners and billboards, they range from a few lines to several feet in size. Most of the type belongs to a single same sans serif type family, in a wide range of heights and an astounding range of 14 weights.
In letterpressed billboards, letters often had to straddle a paper seam, meaning a single piece of wood type needed to lock up in two separate forms. The solution: a saw. The severed letterforms could still be used for future jobs; the printer would lock up the halves and fill the gap with
bar soap. This series of studies employs this truncated typography to create abstract patterns
and textures.
Poster printers such as Globe commonly reused materials and incorporated them back into the shop as functional objects. One from study recombines a group of posters that were trimmed down and repurposed as shelf dividers that were used to keep large wood type neatly stacked and easy to sort and grab. These amputated posters, when recombined, create truncated conversations between color, type and image in celebration of graphic expression.
To round out my body of work, I sought to bring the exhibition full circle by including a new artifact from the still active print shop. Globe designed and printed a poster for the 2009 GD/MFA thesis exhibition. Supplied only with a column of text and a single instruction, “GD/MFA—make this big,” Frank Cicero laid out the poster using Globe’s trademark color palette. Like most of their work, these posters lived in the streets for the a few days until they were torn down, blown away or covered up.
In addition to constituting my MFA degree project, this work is an on-going engagement with the Ciceros and Globe. I plan on continuing to tell their story and better promote their place in the history of American graphic design.