Classic Posters

There are many collections of vintage posters on Flickr, most of them full of the mundane, rather than the classic. What makes an old poster a ‘classic’ anyway? Does it have to have inspired a whole style of advertising, or be an exemplar of a particular style, be well-executed or just be by someone famous? I guess it doesn’t really matter, it seems it just has to be old and have survived to be scanned in and shoved online. It’s nice though when you find some good examples in these collections. I particularly like some of the (depressingly low-resolution) scans on this collection, especially the lettering on the Volga one, which I nearly missed thanks to Flickr’s brutal it-must-be-square thumbnail cropping.