In the golden age of air travel, when passengers dressed to the nines and planes were sleek vessels of modernity, it was all about looking the part. As Matthias C. Hühne explores in Airline Visual Identity: 1945–1975 (Callisto), this was largely a product of the glamorous images created by the airline industry and the booming success of its collective advertising. At 436 pages, this hefty coffee-table book is the most encyclopedic work of its kind yet, using everything from archived boarding cards to case studies to analyze the branding of the top 13 commercial airlines of the period. Most visually stunning, of course, is the art: the iconic campaign graphics and posters impeccably reprinted using 17 colors, five varnishes, foil, and embossing, making the book no less glittering than the era it captures. —Gabrielle Lipton
This article originally appeared in the June/July print issue of DestinAsian magazine (“In Plane Sight”)