Lettered

Joseph J. Gould
Lippincott's - May
1896
lithograph (poster)
Library of Congress, Washington DC

Eric Gill
Society of Wood Engravers
1920
color woodblock print
British Museum

F. Bernard Clarke
London County Council
A.R.P. - A.F.S.
1939
lithograph (poster)
National Museum of American History,
Washington DC

Dat Keely
A.R.P. - Women Wanted
1939
lithograph (poster)
National Museum of American History,
Washington DC

Ben Shahn
Break Reaction's Grip
1946
lithograph (poster)
Smithsonian American Art Museum,
Washington DC

Elaine Lustig Cohen
The Strange Islands - poems by Thomas Merton
1957
lithograph
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Tomoko Miho
Broadway
1968
offset-lithograph
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Elaine Lustig Cohen
Russian Triquarterly
1975-
lithograph
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Anonymous American Designer
Shopping Bag from Fiorucci, New York
ca. 1980
offset-print on paper bag
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Anonymous French Designer
Shopping Bag from Fauchon, Paris
ca. 1985
offset-print on paper bag
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Anonymous Austrian Designer
Shopping Bag from the Albertina, Vienna
1986
offset-print on paper bag
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Philippe Apeloig
Chicago, Naissance d'une Métropole - Musée d'Orsay
1987
screenprint (exhibition poster)
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Michael Schirmer
Alles Falsch - Museum für Gestaltung, Zürich
ca. 1989
screenprint (exhibition poster)
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Anonymous American Designer
Shopping Bag from Chiasso, Chicago
ca. 1990
offset-print on paper bag
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Milton Glaser
Olivetti Quaderno
1993
offset-lithograph (advertising poster)
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

William Eggleston
Untitled (Cushion, Purple Wall, Graffiti, Memphis)
2007
inkjet print
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Philippe Apeloig
Vivo in Typo
Affiches et Alphabets Animés
2008
screenprint (exhibition poster)
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

13 June 1947

    Last night I had a rather wonderful dream.  I was in a lofty dimly lighted old hospital ward, nurses moved about silently and rapidly, sometimes murmuring a word to a patient here and there.

    Beside my own bed stood a Roman Catholic priest, and behind him were two other cloudy people, perhaps an attendant priest and a staff nurse or matron.  He was a little ferrety man with large rimless glasses and a rapt, tortured expression.

    He seemed to bless me with embarrassing depth of feeling, then, still murmuring something, he put his first and second fingers into my mouth and held the points of them against the roof of my mouth very delicately.  He was looking up to heaven murmuring faster now.  His pale face was beginning to be dewed with sweat.

    Gradually a most delicious tingling began to spread through all my body from the point in my mouth which the priest's fingers touched.  In spite of this surging pleasure, I was dimly ashamed of being the priest's patient or victim.  I felt that he was a man I could not help despising a little.  I was in a false position.  He must feel that.  I loved him for the miracle he was performing, whereas I really felt, deep down, only a pale disgust for him and the thing he was doing to me.

    After some moments of this uneasy ecstasy, the priest lifted his two fingers to Heaven, then blessed me and left.  The nice staff nurse or sister at once came up to me and said, "You are healed, isn't it wonderful! You are healed!"

    I could hardly believe it, and kept saying, "Healed for the moment, healed for the moment," to myself.  Indeed my whole attitude in the high hospital ward was a grudging and humiliated one; yet I had affection for the nice sister and even felt something like respect for the priest, in spite of my distaste or rather through it. 

    Now that I was healed, I must have wanted to get away at once from all signs of pain and illness; for I next found myself in the wings of a vast theatre.  I had run there deliriously expecting to find all the friends I did.  Valerie White (a girl I had known at the art school, who has since become quite a well-known actress) was there.  I had never particularly cared for her, but now I was polite and kind and happy and she was too.

    I flitted from group to group of gay friendly people.  I explored all the strange heights and depths behind a stage.  I danced most of the way, spinning, tumbling, kicking, to exercise my new-found joy in movement to the full.  I was singing too, letting the wild excitement ripple off my tongue.

    Then just as I was in a low, wide corridor hung with choking draperies of cotton, a sort of dust-sheet decoration, grim and hopeless, just as I was beginning to feel tired and very thirsty, someone appeared dressed as Hamlet in tight black velvet.  He carried a wide stumpy crystal goblet frosted with cold.  He was rather short, or perhaps the wide shoulders made him look stocky.  His face was squarish – lips, nose, eyes, the cut of his dark hair.  Although I have never seen anyone like him in real life, he was immediately, I knew, my best friend.  He knew it too, and offered me the goblet with a gay flourishing gesture, as if he were laughing at himself.

    I took it in both hands and drank the inky purple liquid; it was loganberry juice – something I have not had since I was seventeen.  It seemed that I could never have enough of the ice-cold deliciousness.  I drank and drank and looked over the rim of the goblet at My Best Friend.  Why did he seem to wear this invisible label?  He was smiling at me, laughing with me; we seemed in complete accord, yet I could tell at a glance that we were very different types of people.  This seemed to make his graciousness all the more precious.  I found myself thinking wildly of ways in which I could be of service to him.  I stretched out my hand to him, he stretched out his hand to me; we were about to do some stamping, strutting, military dance, when he dropped his stage bravado, ran up to me and urged me to leave, in a low serious voice that cut across all our former gaiety.

    The dream faded as we both fled on tiptoe, our fingers to our lips.  But in spite of this ballet-dancer's ending, there was real regret in both of us.  We seemed to be acting this stealth and anxiety to cover up the fact that we must part at the stage door.

– from The Journals of Denton Welch (who was born in 1915, gravely injured in 1935, then wrote the journals between 1942 and his early death in 1948), edited by Michael De-la-Noy (1984)