Football Art in College Yearbooks

Over the last eighteen months, I’ve reviewed the football sections of 3,000+ college yearbooks dating from the late 1800s to 1960, looking for photographs that illustrate the nature of football at the time. Most review time occurs while half-monitoring a midweek MAC football game or similar. The other half of my attention is spent scrolling through the yearbooks to locate their football sections and review their contents. Items of interest are clipped and labeled to facilitate finding those images when needed to illustrate points in this blog.

Old yearbooks also have student artwork that visually separates one section from another. Below are eight favorites. They range from the early twentieth century when color printing became affordable for limited use, to the late 1940s, after which color photographs replaced artwork.

1906 North Carolina Yackety Yak

1908 North Carolina Yackety Yak

1910 Virginia Corks and Curls

1917 Texas Cactus

1917 Virginia Tech Bugle

1928 Carnegie Institute Thistle

1933 U.S. Naval Academy Lucky Bag

1949 Georgia Tech Blue Print

That's it. I lack the expertise to comment on the artistic merits of these examples. I just know I like them and thought others might as well.

I'll share other examples as I find them.

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