Doug Leen will be in Washington, D.C., next month to discuss WPA posters celebrating the national parks.

Were it not for Doug Leen, the "lost art" of the striking national park posters created by the Works Progress Administration artists likely would have been just that, lost.

WPA artists began this project in 1938. The National Park Service’s Western Museum Laboratories proposed the posters and other materials as a way to promote hikes and landscapes in the fledgling National Park System.

“Since issuing the publication ‘Miscellaneous Products of the Western Museum Laboratories,’ we have hardly been able to keep up with the requests from the parks for various items,” Dorr G. Yeager, the assistant chief of the Museum Division of the Western Museum Laboratories in Berkeley, California, wrote to Frank Pinckley, superintendent at Southwestern National Monuments, the administrative arm for monuments in the Southwest, in late August of 1938.

But only 14 parks were produced in print before the onset of World War II shuttered the project. Only 50 to 100 copies of each poster were produced, for a total of perhaps 1,000, figures Leen, a gregarious bear of a man.

Though he turned to dentisty after seven years as a seasonal ranger, Leen never lost his love for the parks, and that love turned into a sideline producing replicas of the WPA posters as well as other national park ephemera.

For nearly half-a-century Leen has scoured the country for original WPA posters. Since he started, 12 of the original 14 park posters have been located by Leen. His decades-long search has turned up originals in the oddest places: garages in Seattle, file drawers at Bandelier National Monument (where they were used as file dividers), and even an attic in California. 

Leen will have 11 of those on hand April 10 at the Sidney R. Yates Auditorium Interior Department in Washington, D.C., when he delivers an hour-long talk beginning at 1:15 p.m. about his efforts to track down those posters.