Ad value

Vintage commercial art brings polish to your pad

by Mike Miliard

A COOLER WORLD: reproduction Job rolling-paper ad, $9.99 at Mostly Posters.

Whether you're moving into a new apartment or a new dorm room this week, nothing's more important to making a fresh start than deciding how to decorate your walls. You don't want to expose yourself as a prisoner of pop-culture cliché (news flash, freshmen: John Belushi is dead, and that Animal House poster just ain't it anymore). What you want is the continental cool and crisp visual elegance of vintage European advertising posters.

"These posters are the art of the 20th century," says Jim Lapides, who owns the International Poster Gallery on Newbury Street. "They're a fantastic expression of history. They represent the intersection of culture, art, and business. And aside from that, they're simply luscious to look at."

Lapides's gallery, teeming with 10,000 original specimens, is the best place to get inspiration. A 1925 Italian lithograph of a chimp quaffing "Anisetta Evangelisti: Liquore da Dessert" is at once funny and beautiful, exquisitely rendered in yellows and earth tones. French posters of towering ocean liners turn an ordinary wall into a dramatic sweep of angularity and force. And if you're keen to display your revolutionary sensibilities, a little Bolshevik propaganda -- or even a Russian-language advert for a 1928 Harold Lloyd film festival -- beats that tired Che Guevara poster any day.

But many of IPG's posters sell for close to $10,000 -- out of reach for most of us. Even many smaller pieces can go for $200 or $300, and small display prints from the gallery's walls cost about $35 to $250.

If an original is beyond your means, however, a reproduction will do just fine. Head to Mostly Posters, where you'll find a blinding array of stately Art Deco renderings and brightly hued cartoons, most in the $35 range. At the high end, there's the behemoth advertisement for Melchior vermouth, depicting a harried French waiter filling glasses held in seven outstretched hands ($70; $229 framed). But just $9.99 will get you a tiny, matted ad for Job rolling paper, starring a reclining, smoke-ring-encircled sultan -- which is a lot cooler than a reclining, smoke-ring-encircled Bob Marley.

Stores mentioned in this article:

* Mostly Posters, 1022 Comm Ave, Boston, (617) 232-7335

* El Cafetal, 479 Cambridge Street, Brighton, (617) 789-4009.

* International Poster Gallery, 205 Newbury Street, Boston, (617) 375-0076

* The International Poster Gallery's Web site, an exhaustive and searchable compendium of the best in vintage ads from around the world, is www.internationalposters.com.