Iola Public Library will offer to the public for the first time Tuesday a glimpse of several World War II posters the library had unknowingly stored for decades.
Librarian Roger Carswell will show the roughly three dozen posters at 7 p.m. Tuesday — the evening before Veterans Day — while providing an explanation of why they convey the messages they do.
The library has had the posters since World War II, but most laid forgotten in the basement for many years.
“Some years ago I was cleaning out some shelves in the basement and I ran across the posters in a pile of other paper items, mostly junk,” Carswell said. “No one knew they were there. They had evidently been retained, luckily, when the new library was built about 50 years ago, but probably promptly forgotten again.”
Since some of them had the library’s address printed on them for mailing purposes, it was obvious that the posters had been sent to the library during the war.
Carswell moved the pile of posters to his office, where the Allen County Historical Museum borrowed a few of them for a display, and Bill Shirley showed some in his history classes at Allen Community College.
Otherwise, they have been rarely seen.
Last year Carswell, who has a strong interest in history, obtained two acid-free and ultraviolet-filtering poster frames and has two of them hanging in his office.
Acid-free storage was obtained for the remainder of the posters at the same time.
Now the library is ready to show them to a general audience.
The posters cover a wide variety of topics. There are several posters promoting war bonds. Other posters urge people to save waste fats and can their garden produce. They promote joining the Women’s Land Army, the Cadet Nurse Corps and the Army Specialized Training Reserve Program.
The program will include the context in which the posters were produced. “Unless you know quite a bit about World War II, you may not understand the messages on the posters,” Carswell said. “Why did they want people to save waste fats? Or minimize travel? What is the Women’s Land Army? What is rationing and how did it work? These are the sorts of things I’ll explain in addition to showing the posters.”
The program will be presented in the library meeting room.
WWII poster program at library Tuesday
