Keep Calm and Carry On

The most famous British poster of the Second World War is one most Britons never saw during it. The Ministry of Information designed it in 1939 as one of three morale posters and printed almost 2.5 million copies, but kept this one in reserve for a German invasion, while its siblings "Freedom Is in Peril" and "Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution Will Bring Us Victory" were issued. Most copies were pulped after the war. It teaches the gap between what a state prepares to say and what it actually says. The slogan only became famous after a folded copy turned up in 2000 in a box of secondhand books bought at auction by Barter Books, a shop in northern England.