“Keep These Hands Off!” the Second World War poster implores, urging people to buy victory bonds as a mother and baby cower from the gnarled hands of the enemy. “Keep These Hands Off!” the pandemic version of the poster echoes, as the same mother and baby cower, but with masks. “Who knows what, or who you touched.”

The Toronto Public Library has more than 100 wartime posters in its digital collection and, last week, they asked people to remix them “to speak to the new historic moment we’re in.”

They were surprised and heartened by the close to 70 submissions they received through the Toronto subreddit. In one, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau holds out a CERB cheque instead of a soldier holding a War Savings Certificate. In another, a health care worker stands in for a soldier walking to a battlefield.

“Are your folks ashamed of you for not enlisting?” a Royal Newfoundland Regiment poster asks in 1918, showing a proud lion roaring atop a rock. “Are your folks ashamed of you for open sneezing?” the pandemic version asks, with droplets added in front of the lion, turning the roar into a sneeze.

During the world wars, the Canadian government produced hundreds of illustrated posters to inspire citizens to make sacrifices and contributions to the war effort, using a mix of shame, patriotism and emotion.

According to the Canadian War Museum, many of the propaganda posters for the Second World War were the work of the Bureau of Public Information. Early in the war, the posters focused on words rather than images, along with a good dose of humour. As the war continued, the posters became more aggressive and sombre as campaigns “focused on building unity, harnessing collective energy and demonstrating the evils of fascism.”

Last week, David Sprague, the digital content lead for the Toronto library’s special collections was looking through the library’s online collection and was struck by how many posters targeted people on the home front.

“A ton of them are calling on everyday citizens, not soldiers, to do their part, whether it be not being wasteful with coal, or looking around the house to donate spoons and cutlery to build wartime equipment,” he says. He was struck by the “surprising” similarity to the messaging for the pandemic calling on citizens to stay home.

All library branches are closed (some have been repurposed for food bank distribution), but the online collection remains accessible. Working from home, Sprague issued the remix challenge on the Toronto subreddit, where the library often posts historic Toronto pictures and artifacts from its ever-expanding digital archive. “We’ve really built a rapport there, there are lots of really engaged, civically minded people … it’s also a really great way for us to reach out to non-library users.”

Very quickly, dozens of touching and funny images were posted to the thread. He was genuinely moved, he says, by a poster that had changed the “4 reasons for buying victory bonds” to “4 reasons to stay home,” swapping out various caricatures of the enemy for a baby, a health-care worker, a senior and a person experiencing homelessness. “We’re all concerned about our vulnerable population in Toronto so that really hit home.”

One of the most popular images was a redesigned Second World War poster on which a stack of toilet paper replaced an elephant, keeping the same wartime message: “If you don’t need it … Don’t buy it!”

Reddit user u/etc-etc- said the slogan “immediately called to mind” toilet paper since it “seemed to be one of the strangest things that people were panic buying early on” during this pandemic. “I made it fairly quickly (maybe 10-15 min?) It’s definitely a little rushed — I thought someone else might have the same idea and wanted to post it quickly,” the designer wrote in an email to the Star.

Amy Kwong, the owner of Smitten Kitten paper goods, said a poster shaming young men for not enlisting caught her eye, with the tag line: “Your Chums are Fighting. Why aren’t YOU?” Last Sunday morning, coffee in hand, the greeting card designer went to work, swapping out soldiers with guns for a small army of masked bakers holding whisks. “Your Chums are Baking. Why aren’t YOU?”

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“On Instagram and Facebook everybody is posting all their baking creations,” she says, “People aren’t shaming me for not baking obviously, but inside of me it’s like, ‘Why can’t you bake?’ So I just thought it’s sort of a lighter take because sometimes you just need a little bit of humour in a difficult situation.”

Kwong closed her Liberty Village shop I Have A Crush On You in mid-March. It was nice to have something fun and creative do with her skills during the pandemic, she says.

Lana Leprich, the digital marketing manager of Tafelmusik, saw the post last Friday. The Baroque orchestra and chamber choir team has been making more digital content during the pandemic with their #TafelmusikTogether campaign and have been watching how other Toronto institutions are adapting. “We’ve always been big fans of Toronto Public Library’s content, particularly on Reddit,” she said.

They decided it might be fun and, since Leprich has always loved Photoshop, it became her “half-hour end of the day fun project.”

She was drawn to a WWII poster encouraging aircraft production, with a muscular worker launching planes into the air with his bare hands. Below the worker was a large circle with images from the factory. Leprich made that into a record, gave the worker a pair of headphones and changed nearly all of the airplanes in the sky to music notes. She swapped the slogan “Roll em out!” for “Stay Home, Spin Vinyl.”

Go to https://torontopubliclibrary.typepad.com/local-history-genealogy/2020/04/we-asked-toronto-to-remix-wartime-posters-for-the-current-moment.html to see the Toronto Public Library’s roundup of the posters.