A Vision of Tomorrow, Saved from the Fair
In the summer of 1939, with war clouds gathering over Europe and the Great Depression still fresh in American memory, millions of visitors streamed through the gates of the New York World's Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens. The Fair's theme — The World of Tomorrow — promised something people desperately needed: optimism. And nowhere was that optimism more intoxicating than inside General Motors' Highways and Horizons pavilion, home to the legendary Futurama exhibit. This slim, illustrated souvenir booklet is a surviving artifact of that extraordinary moment.
Printed in 1939 and distributed across the 1939–1940 run of the Fair, this paper booklet carries the iconic GM logo alongside the stylized Futurama typography conceived by visionary industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes. Bel Geddes was the mastermind behind the Futurama ride itself — a sweeping scale model of America circa 1960, viewed from moving chairs suspended above a landscape of superhighways, gleaming cities, and ordered prosperity. Visitors sat back and floated over a future that felt engineered, inevitable, and thrilling. When they stepped off, GM handed them a button that read "I Have Seen the Future." This booklet was the take-home proof.
The Disney Connection That Makes This Piece Remarkable
On its surface, this is a General Motors corporate keepsake. But for Disney collectors and historians, it occupies a fascinating orbit around the Disney universe — and that proximity is exactly why it traveled with the estate collection that brought it here.
The intellectual and aesthetic DNA of the 1939 Futurama runs in a direct line to two of the most beloved corners of the Disney parks. When Walt Disney began planning Disneyland in the early 1950s, he enlisted C.V. Wood — the operational mastermind who became Disneyland's first general manager and a key figure in turning Walt's vision into a functioning theme park. Wood operated in a world deeply shaped by the World's Fair tradition and the Futurama ideal of experiential, narrative-driven pavilions. The language of optimistic futurism that Bel Geddes made popular in 1939 became foundational to how Disney imagined Tomorrowland.
Later, when Walt turned his attention to EPCOT — his grand, unrealized dream of an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow — he drew explicitly on the World's Fair model. The 1964–1965 New York World's Fair, at which Disney debuted four landmark attractions including It's a Small World and the Ford Magic Skyway, was in many ways the spiritual heir to the 1939 Fair and its Futurama pavilion. The loop is tight: Bel Geddes imagined it, the 1939 World's Fair showcased it, and Walt Disney spent a career translating that same faith in the designed future into something permanent and beloved.
Norman Bel Geddes and the Futurama Aesthetic
To hold this booklet is to hold a piece of Norman Bel Geddes' visual language. Bel Geddes was one of the defining American designers of the twentieth century — a theatrical set designer turned industrial visionary who believed deeply that streamlined, purposeful design could reshape civilization. His Futurama exhibit cost GM roughly $7 million to construct and became the single most popular attraction at the 1939 World's Fair, drawing over 28,000 visitors per day at its peak.
The stylized Futurama typography featured on this booklet's cover is a direct expression of that aesthetic: clean, forward-leaning letterforms that communicated speed, progress, and confidence. For graphic design and typography enthusiasts, it is a snapshot of a moment when American commercial art was at its most ambitious and self-assured.
Condition, Character, and the Estate Provenance
This booklet shows the honest wear of a keepsake that was actually kept. There is a heavy horizontal crease across the center, almost certainly from being folded and slipped into a coat or trouser pocket — the universal souvenir behavior of a fair-goer who wanted to carry the future home with them. The right margin shows edge wear and light chipping, consistent with decades of storage. Surface scuffing and minor discoloration appear on the darker printed areas, and there may be some binding wear or light rust at the staple points. The interior page count has not been fully verified, so the booklet is offered as found.
These are not flaws to apologize for. They are the physical biography of an object that was present, was used, and was saved. Someone walked through the GM pavilion in Flushing Meadows, picked this up, folded it into their pocket, and held onto it for the better part of a century. It came to us as part of a larger Disney-adjacent estate collection, gathered by someone with an eye for the connective tissue between American popular culture, the World's Fair tradition, and the Disney imagination.
For the collector who thinks about Disney history in its full context — not just the films and the parks, but the cultural currents that shaped Walt's vision — this booklet is a rare and tangible thread. It is paper, ink, and a crease from 1939. It is someone pocketing the future on a summer afternoon in Queens. And it is, unmistakably, a precursor to the world Walt Disney would spend his life building.
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