What begins in late summer and concludes the following spring? The academic year, you might guess. In this case, even though Stanford is central to the issue, we're thinking of something else: the elapsed time between the filming of an Antiques Roadshow segment and its eventual broadcast date.
When the popular PBS television show filmed three episodes in San Jose in August, the heart of the process, as always, was giving thousands of people the opportunity to place prized heirlooms and flea-market finds in front of appraisers at the city's convention center. But the program also made a side trip to the Farm to tape a feature on the Hoover Institution's collection of upwards of 200,000 20th-century political posters.
If the segment airs—there's no guarantee that everything filmed on location will appear in an episode—it won't be until spring. Of course, as much fun as it might be to see treasures of the Hoover archives celebrated on national TV, thousands of posters can be browsed online anytime, with options to search by country, artist and subject.
The posters come from more than 80 countries, with about 16,000 from the United States and the United Kingdom online, plus more than 4,000 from Germany. The one featured above is from China and depicts children with a portrait of Mao Tse-tung, celebrating the founding of the People's Republic of China 60 years ago on October 1, 1949.
