Vintage travel posters are one of our favourite subjects, we’ve featured quite a few designers who worked in the industry.
For someone so prolific, talented and who worked for one of the biggest corporations in the world, we can’t find out much about Aaron Fine. All we’ve found out is that he was friends with Andy Warhol and that he died of cancer.
Other than Pan Am posters we have only seen evidence of him authoring and illustrating a single children’s book, Peter Plants a Pocketful in 1955. He illustrated The Hidden House by Margaret Wise Brown.
Vintage original examples come up for sale occasionally on eBay or you can find prints much more easily on Etsy. In addition, there’s a range of prints available from Classic Vintage Posters.
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Weirdly enough, Aaron Fine is the subject of an entire chapter of Bert Greene’s book Kitchen Bouquets. They were collaborators and very close friends, who worked together on an off-Broadway play called The Trial, and they spent a lot of time together (the exact nature of their relationship is unclear and may be obfuscated on purpose; at any rate, Greene seems to have been shattered over his death). Apparently Fine didn’t like his commercial work very much but accepted that it paid the bills. Some of his recipes are included in the section—seems like Fine was obsessed with French cooking.