Save Waste Paper, a four-step sorting poster

Save Waste Paper is a 1944 U.S. government salvage poster with no issuer printed. A smiling woman in an apron ties a cardboard bundle beside a numbered list of four kinds of paper and the line "Give or sell it!" (NAID 515345).

What the poster prints

A woman in a red and white striped apron smiles as she ties up a bundle of cardboard. Stacks of newspapers and magazines sit near her, along with a wastebasket ringed in stars. The headline is three words, then the instructions are numbered like a recipe.

Save
Waste
Paper

Sort and Bundle

1
BROWN PAPER, BAGS,
CORRUGATED BOXES

2
WASTEBASKET SCRAPS

3
OLD NEWSPAPERS

4
OLD MAGAZINES

GIVE OR
SELL IT!

CALL YOUR SALVAGE
COMMITTEE TODAY!

[imprint: U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 1944—O—607301]

Who issued it

No agency name is printed. The Government Printing Office imprint shows it was a federal print job, and the archive describes the maker as a U.S. government salvage campaign. The reader is pointed to a local salvage committee, which places the actual collecting at the town level.

How to read it

This is among the least coercive sheets of the war. It tells a household what to sort, how, and whom to call. The archive tags it plain folks, for the cheerful homemaker, and transfer, for the stars on the basket. Both are light touches.

"Give or sell it" is the line worth stopping on. The poster does not demand the paper as a duty owed. It allows the owner to be paid. That respects the plain fact that the paper was private property, and that a household could contribute to the war and still be compensated for what it gave. A salvage drive built that way relies on persuasion and a market, not on requisition.

A 1945 War Production Board sheet, Declare a Paper Holiday, approached the same shortage from the shopper's side. An earlier conservation appeal, a 1942 Douglas Aircraft sheet, leaned on a racial slur instead; this one needs none. The federal poster system is on the Office of War Information hub. Salvage appeals were the voluntary end of the home front. The compulsory end, from mail censorship to Executive Order 9066, is in the Roosevelt administration essay.