The positive messages and programs of the Works Progress Administration, started 75 years ago, helped create roads, buildings, bridges and parks across the nation.

While the New Deal jobs program is most remembered for building or refurbishing countless large-scale projects, its work in Cleveland ranged from development of the Metroparks to the first segment of the Shoreway.

But the WPA also encompassed such novel programs as the Federal Writers' Project, which produced a series of state and regional guide books, the Federal Theatre Project and the Federal Arts Project. Its legacy is the artwork -- murals, paintings and sculptures -- produced by an army of out-of-work artists for hundreds of public places.

In the Cleveland area, they include the Cleveland Public Library, numerous post offices, schools and Public Auditorium.

Much less visible and remembered are the 2 million posters commissioned by the WPA to promote classes, parks, exhibitions, public housing and the positive social objectives of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.

Nearly 500 of them are featured in a new coffee-table book, "Posters for the People: Art of the WPA," which arrives in time for the New Deal's 75th anniversary. Produced by the WPA Living Archive, a 6-year-old preservationist group, the book includes more than 100 "new" posters that weren't previously published or catalogued. It draws extensively from the Library of Congress, which has the largest public collection, and features some work that was seen in a show organized two years ago by the Cleveland Artists Foundation.

Cleveland was, in fact, a major recipient of WPA art, and was one of the half-dozen major cities where the WPA Poster Division set up shop. The size of its contribution to "Posters for the People" exceeds that of every other city -- and state -- except New York, Chicago and Philadelphia.

The biggest number are by Cleveland artist and lithographer Stanley Thomas Clough. A couple of his posters -- "Please keep the park clean" and "Let them grow" -- deliver simple messages in a restful style suited to children's books. Others, more stylized, promote 1938 exhibitions at the Federal Art Gallery on Euclid Avenue. And Clough brought a punchy, modernist style to a poster promoting public housing at Lakeview Terrace, with the statement, "Live here at low rent."

Judging from the style, Clough might have been the unidentified artist behind another poster, for Cedar-Central Apartments, showing a girl zooming down a slide beneath the line "Your children like these low rent homes."

A smiling fellow in overalls, rendered in contemporary-looking minimalist style, promotes "Low rent Woodhill Homes" in a poster by Earl Schuler, while another by him, urging people to "Report dog bites" to City Hall, easily could advertise a horror movie. A third from Schuler breezily advertises a Gilbert & Sullivan production by the Cincinnati Federal Light Opera Group.

The Federal Music Project joined with the Cuyahoga County Opera Association for a presentation of "Carmen" that artist John LaQuatra promoted with a blazing toreador. Cleveland's Federal Art Gallery had an exhibition of children's drawings that George Vander Sluis promoted with a charming poster featuring a clown drawn by a 10-year-old.

Further underlining the range of work, posters by artist Blanche Anish advertise courses in the relatively new field of airplane mechanics, in building trades and in music. Another by James H. Murphy touts classes in tailoring.

Others, by unknown local artists, deliver such positive messages as "Swim for health," "Milk for health" and "Milk for summer thirst." "Enjoy, don't destroy," advises one about plant life in parks.

About 500 artists were hired in the poster project before the WPA was phased out in 1943. Their work, once considered a footnote in the history of graphic design, now are seen as an important historical record -- accomplished and inspiring examples of American art that depict a "kinder, gentler nation" and influenced the next generation of fine art printmakers.