Stereotypically secretive and serious, these posters from the 1950s and 60s show another side of the NSA, full of strange art and bizarre messaging spanning from internal security to the drug war.

Stylistically, they are signs of their times, spanning typography, colors and layouts one might expect to find on book covers, movie adverts or propaganda pamphlets of the time (or retro motivational posters today).

Santa, the Mona Lisa, aliens and death itself become strange characters in these various otherworldly dramas, some of which seem to be set inside Alice in Wonderland or on extraterrestrial planetary bodies.

Given their limited agency-internal audience, they are surprisingly artful and well-executed. They were declassified after a recent Freedom of Information Act request.

But unlike redacted documents, there isn’t much to protect here, so the posters are essentially shown in their entirety.

“Information which would reveal NSA/CSS functions and activities and names of NSA/CSS employees have been deleted from the enclosure. These deletions are exempt from disclosure pursuant to the third exemption of the FOIA, which provides for the withholding of information specifically protected from disclosure by statute.”

Designed for 19th-century travelers trekking up and down the mighty Mississippi on riverboats, these scrolled parchments unspooled to reveal major cities and points of interest worthy of note along the way. The Ribbon Map of the Father of Waters in particular had an impressive reach, spanning from Minnesota down to the Gulf of Mexico, just three inches wide but eleven feet long.

Unlike “network maps,” designed to allow users to seek out different points of interest and map out their own route, these “itinerary maps” documented a single path, like a long guide to a single trail versus an atlas.

“Strip maps arose from oral or written itineraries,” writes Cara Giaimo, “and were used by ancient Romans who wanted to plan trips to nearby towns, and medieval Europeans who hoped to make pilgrimages from London to Jerusalem. Reading one is like getting directions from a friend: left at this landmark, right at that fork.”

In the 1860s, a pair of St. Louis-based entrepreneurs made their first “ribbon map,” and patented an associated sheet-connecting technique and scrolling apparatus. If it had sold as well as they hoped (to passengers, not the captains who knew routes like the backs of their hands), they had plans to unfurl other linear maps for places like Broadway in New York City or rail lines between major cities.

And while some were sold, they never took off as intended, and, of course, have since been replaced by higher-tech solutions.

Can you think of an iconic electronic object for every letter of the alphabet? A for Apple, B for Bose, C for Canon, D for Dell and so on, all the way to Z? Graphic designer Vinicius Araujo found the most obvious (and satisfying) answer for all 26 letters and crafted them into renderings of appropriately shaped electronics. The series, which he calls ‘36days Electronics,’ is based on the Helvetica typeface.

For Apple, there’s a classic Macintosh computer with a floppy disk drive; Bose looks like a speaker; Epson is a printer; Motorola is the most ancient of cell phones; Sony’s a Walkman.

Functionality isn’t the point here – a computer monitor shaped like a D obviously isn’t going to do you much good. But it’s a fun visual exercise that will likely spur some nostalgia for the technology days of yore – or perhaps gratitude that our gadgets have evolved.

See more photos at Vinicius Araujo’s Behance portfolio.

Back in the 1600s, long before science fiction authors dreamed up digital e-readers, this Jacobean traveling library was making the rounds, housing dozens of small books in a larger book-shaped case. Bound in leather like a large folio volume, it is thought to be one of the first of its kind.

The handcrafted wooden shell was purpose-built to house a collection of littler volumes that could in theory be swapped out for different journeys, much like loading up a modern device with novels or other entertainment.

Located at the University of Leeds Library, this case is presumed to have been commissioned by a lawyer and politician named William Hakewell in 1617 as a holiday gift (as the recipient’s and giver’s coats of arms are both found on the case). The case is quite compelling — it looks a lot like a book upon casual inspection — while the contents are neatly arranged in similar-looking bindings.

The gift included classics by Ovid, Virgil and Cicero among others, spanning a range of philosophical and theological subjects. Hakewell commissioned several similar cases over the years, which would also have facilitated trades across collections of friends if they were so inclined. Each case also contained a list of original books that came with the commission, which in turn have numbers corresponding to the list

Some great institutions are becoming even greater in the digital age — places like museums continue to scan high-quality paintings and photographs for distribution and agencies like NASA put vintage pictures and video footage online for everyone to access.

Joining the cool kids’ club, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD) has taken its Art of the Poster collection from the Golden Age of graphic design (late 1800s through the early 1900s) and put it up on the web for anyone to share.

“Featuring over 200 printed works, Art of the Poster 1880-1918 presents a look at lithography’s rise in popularity during La Belle Époque,” reports MyModernMet. “It was during this time that artists like Alphonse Mucha, Jules Chéret, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec popularized the art form, which gained public prominence thanks to new methods of production.”

In the late nineteenth century, lithographers began to use mass-produced zinc plates rather than stones in their printing process. This innovation allowed them to prepare multiple plates, each with a different color ink, and to print these with close registration on the same sheet of paper. Posters in a range of colors and variety of sizes could now be produced quickly, at modest cost.

At the time, many of these masterpieces were essentially commercial in nature, designed to promote products, stores and restaurants. Today, they have made their way into the archives of art history, helping to bridge the gap between popular culture and the closed-door art world of museum exhibits.