“Keep Calm and Carry On” was a motivational poster created and circulated by the British government in 1939, before the beginning of WWII, intended to boost the morale of the Civilians in the aftermath of widely predicted mass air attacks on major cities. Some 2.5m copies of posters were printed, but in the end they were kept back; “held in reserve, intended for use only in times of crisis or invasion”, which happily never came.
Stuart & Mary Manley of Barter Books re-discovered the WW2 poster ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ back in 2001 and brought it to the attention of the general public. The old WWII poster proved so popular with customers that a year later the shop began selling facsimile copies. Since that time, the rediscovered ‘KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON’ poster, copied and recopied (as well as parodied!) by others, has sold in the millions to become one of the first truly iconic images of the twenty-first century.
Some different Version’s of “Keep Calm and …” Posters.
