Regular visitors to this skiing web site already know about my enthusiasm for classical ski posters. Actually I love just about all ski posters but the finest are from the period between the two World Wars — not just pre high-speed chairlifts, but pre-chairlifts period.

These are mostly stone lithographs, very large, and rich in color and detail, if often somewhat inexact in their technical portrayal of what skiers and winter vacationers are doing. In the forties, poster designers began to use photographs as well as airbrushed art deco drawings, and these early photographic ski posters still have a non-literal, romanitic quality that today's ski area PR guys just can't seem to equal.

Here are a few of my favorites. Sip a Campari and soda and imagine yourself the hero or heroine of an old time ski movie.…