One day in the early nineteen-nineties, during the worst of the AIDS crisis in the United States, a physician named Edward Atwater was taking a Red Line train in Boston when he noticed a cartoonish poster on the wall. It showed a pair of hands unwrapping a condom, with a simple message on either side of the illustration: “Prevent AIDS. Use One.”
The poster, which was created by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, interested Atwater so much that he started a collection. In the following decades, he amassed some sixty-two hundred posters in a range of languages and dialects—Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Spanish, and nearly sixty others.
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