The story
In the summer of 1939, with war looming, Britain’s Ministry of Information designed three “Home Publicity” posters. Each set a short slogan under a Tudor crown. Two read “Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution Will Bring Us Victory” and “Freedom Is in Peril / Defend It With All Your Might.”
The third said “Keep Calm and Carry On,” and it was meant for the darkest days. Some 2.45 million copies were printed. But officials worried the line was too ordinary to inspire, and that it “may even annoy people that we should seem to doubt the steadiness of their nerves.”
So it was only rarely put on display, and most copies are believed to have been pulped at the end of the war. For more than half a century it was all but forgotten.
In 2000, the owners of a secondhand bookshop in Alnwick, in northern England, found a copy in a box of books bought at auction. They hung it in the shop, and in 2001 they began selling reproductions. Soon it was everywhere.
