The Reverend Billy Sunday was among America's most significant histiorical figures of the 20th Century. His infectious evangelical zeal inspired over 100 million people in his lifetime. When America entered the Great War in 1917, the government Committee on Public Information immediately called upon Sunday to use his oratorical gift in the service of his country, which led to his crossing the counrty to inspire the purchase of Liberty Bonds, along with friends of his Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford. In his travels, Sunday acquired posters and other war time ephemera as keepsakes of his experience. The posters covered many subjects, including conservation, recruitment, industry and volunteerism, as well as classic and rare examples of war loan patriotic art, often by America's top illustrators, such as Howard Chandler Christy, James Montgomery Flagg and J.C. Leyendecker. His trek took him everywhere from Madison Square Garden to the new western jewels like Denver, Colorado. He collected the 147 different posters offered in this lot as well as dozens of smaller documents, tickets and other printed war ephemera. At the end of the war, Sunday housed his collection in four oversized albums. Each poster was carefully folded and laid onto album pages using only flour and water, making them easily removable in the future. Sunday placed his 147 posters in albums when they were only days or weeks old, thus keeping them away from light and dust, and preserving their incredible color, now as bold as the day they were printed. Each and every item in his albums could, if desired, be easily removed and placed onto conservation backings. Most all are Mint barring their folio folds. A few have had a fold or two carefully mended with archival tape. This important collection includes Marine Corps and Navy recruitment posters, as well as many others which are in themselves highly desirable, with values in excess of $3,000 each. There are also a number of posters which were doubtless originally printed in tiny quantities and localized for a single area, like Denver, and which have seldom ever surfaced. The Billy Sunday Collection has iron-clad provenance, having been deaccessed many years ago from the Grace College Seminary in Winona Lake, IN, which houses the Sunday archives. The collection comes with letters of authenticity from the Seminary as well as interesting background letters from the Seminary's archivist. The collection of 147 posters may be viewed in its entirety (there are 4 parts to the video) on YouTube. Search on YouTube under Billy Sunday Poster or see our links on our Facebook page. To view the videos direct from this page, please click on the following links: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four. Additional photos of the posters are available online at our website. The opening bid is markedly less than the value of the items even without their important historical association.