ABOUT THIS SITE

This website was created to fill a void for collectors and enthusiasts of vintage Pan Am posters. 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. With this demand and interest, it’s not surprising that 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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As a collector of Pan Am posters, this gap frustrated me. If I collected stamps, or coins, or 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, 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 and extensive digital image gallery of Pan Am posters. Second, and fundamental for this website, over the last 10+ 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 presented here for all to enjoy and reference is the culmination of this work.

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Please help 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.