I found these magnificent posters on the Library of Congress’ ‘Prints & Photographs Online Catalog’ They were commissioned by the Austrian government during World War One to encourage Austrian citizens to subscribe to various Kriegsanleihe or ‘War Loan’ schemes.

These 2 posters are my favorites. The artist is Thomas Fasche – I find it interesting that posters produced, basically for war propaganda can have such artistic merit. These have a beautiful Art Nouveau style.

Many of the posters feature medieval imagry (valiant knights etc. representing the glory of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) :

I collected 15 ‘Kriegsanleihe’ posters in all, click HERE to see them all on Flickr.

Or click HERE to download all 15.

The prints and Photographs Online Catalog is a rich source of public domain images (1000′s available) which could be used for product creation (image cd’s, prints etc) although you need to be careful as not all images on here are in the public domain.

The images I have posted here are small, JPEG’s but also available, are the uncompressed archival TIFF versions. These are massive image files (up to 60, 70 MB!) with crazy resolutions (1200 dpi).  Even if you have a fast modern pc , it is going to struggle with images of this size. If you are patient however and can work with them in photoshop or whatever (I used Fireworks) you can get them down to a 300 dpi approx 1 MB image which is more workable and perfect for making prints. I think these would look stunning and would sell really well on Ebay.