Before the car -- Producing a landscape of signs -- A nation on wheels -- The culture of mobility -- Producing mobile audiences and corridors of consumption -- The aesthetics of speed and the powers of "picturization" -- Modern art and advertising -- Distributing traffic and trade: decentralization and the birth of the strip -- Visualizing distribution -- The consolidation and growth of national advertising -- Traffic and trade: "buying power in motion" -- An architecture of mobility -- The strip -- "The billboard war": scenic sisters and the business of highway beautification -- "The billboard war" -- When separate spheres collide -- The pastoral view -- "Billboard barons" -- Zoning and the road to federal legislation -- Losers and winners -- Conclusion: the road ahead
Summary
Annotation Shows how the placeless markets that billboards created presage the pop-ups in the ultimate placeless space, the Internet. Richly illustrated with more than 60 illustrations--including an 8-page color insert--of billboards and ads from across the century, this book traces the evolution of billboards from urban centers of the 1920s to the freeways that stretch across America today
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 303-318) and index
