Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey. The Greatest Show on Earth. Al G. Kelly and Miller Bros. 2nd Largest Circus. These are the dirt and mud spawning beds of some of the most fantastic poster design in the history of the world. I’m drawing a line in the sand here, a circus line. One that clowns honk their lives on. Lions and tigers, trapeze artists, acrobats, and everything else they could fit inside three rings and a whole mess of tent. This is a poster collection consisting of the Princeton University collection of American Circus posters PLUS a whole mess of additional posters as wrangled up from collections across the internet, including of course the US Library of Congress – our friends!

NOTE: On the copyright of these items: for the most part, anything from Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey are from the 1940′s and 50′s and are probably still within someone’s legal right to claim ownership over. MANY of the other items you’ll find here are from around the 1900′s, making them so old that they’re legally entered into the public domain. If you do not know what this mumbo jumbo is about, please take the time to read up on USA copyright before you start your own tshirt and poster business with these images.

With fabulousness such as this, it’s tempting, isn’t it? Hella tempting.

Now the following collection is hella diverse. You’re going to find posters from the previously mentioned Ringling Bros and Barnum & Baileys all the way down to Al G. Kelly and Miller Bros. 2nd Largest Circus and Circus Krone. That one, Krone, for example, is German, but for the most part, this collection stays in America.

What we’re searching for here is excellence. Pre-cursors to the maximus minimalist design of today, here’s the extravagance without getting the jumblance. True masters are at work here, truly masters in their fields. And what’s ironic about that? Many of these posters were probably designed in a field. All grassy and inky. Covered in elephant dung.

Super awesome!

To access details about many of these posters, please move your brain on over to a collective page here that’s got each poster listed with the information Princeton uncovered about date, accession, size, and even the drawer they’ve got it held in if you ever plan on going over to see these posters in real life. I bet they get even doozier.

Another excellent resource for more information on these images is Wikimedia Commons, where searching for Circus Posters is as simple as doing a double backflip, catching a lion along the way! — Now let’s take a look down here. In some cases I left the whole poster (most cases, I should say,) but then in a bunch of pictures I cut down posters for you to see some magnificent close-ups.

ALSO: Check out these sources for more magical poster power – V. Poster Works, Circus Museum, Vintage Rock and Roll, and the NYPL Gallery Library. Note that this gallery is considerably large in the “American Circus” category, but some other languages and attractions were allowed to slip in due to awesomeness. Example: Solomon the Man Monkey – this missing link goes to church on Sunday!

This post is part of the World Famous Design Junkies celebration category.

Below you’ll find the rest of the gallery. Feel free to click any tiny image here to bring up a larger version, then move back and forth through the gallery using the “Next Image” and “Previous Image” links. Then, if you’d like the entire set in their largest format, don’t hesitate to download a big fat .zip file of all the pictures: wfdj_circusposters.zip courtesy of the hardcore design collector family here at WFDJ.