In a Bethesda Bookstore, the Prints of Propaganda

Moursund finds this weird stuff when he is out scouting for old books. Sometimes an image just cries out to become a poster.

"I just look at them and there's the Wow! factor," he says, smiling. "The real kick I get is to see people flip through these and say, 'What the hell?' That's the reaction I'm going for."

These posters aren't for everybody: You have to share Moursund's sense of humor to appreciate them. But between the bookstore and its Web site -- georgetownbookshop.com -- Moursund has sold nearly 5,000 posters, at $25 unframed or $40 framed.

Which raises the question: Who buys this stuff?

Teachers buy many of them for use their classrooms, which pleases Moursund. The rest go to folks who just take a fancy to an image.

"The first person who bought this," Moursund says, holding the Klan's "Christian Soldiers" poster, "was a black man who is the former president of Fisk University."

That's Walter Leonard, 74, retired after a distinguished career at Harvard and Fisk, and now living in Chevy Chase.

"Why did I buy it?" Leonard says. He laughs, then gets serious. "I have been a collector of art and historical memorabilia, particularly memorabilia that depicts both sides of American life -- its promise and its reality. Often the promise and the reality get confused. We have to see to it that the reality is placed before America like a mirror."

Is the poster hanging in his house?

"Not yet," he says. But he plans to hang it in his library or maybe his sitting room, someplace where his wife won't encounter it too often. "In the interests of domestic tranquillity," he explains, "I try to keep these things out of my wife's way."

Back in the bookstore, Moursund pulls out another poster. It's a photo of a rundown storefront in a nondescript brick building. The sign above the door reads: "Helen's Place New & Used Clothing for Men, Women, Children and Transvestite."

"I took that picture in Knoxville," he says. "It was the spring of 1975."

That was particularly odd period in Moursund's odd life. In those days, he and a girlfriend earned their living traveling to campuses across America, showing campy old TV programs, complete with the original advertisements, to inebriated college kids at midnight screenings. The show ended with the Mickey Mouse Club singing, "Now it's time to say goodbye," then a quick cut to Richard Nixon saying, "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore." In the Watergate era, that clever juxtaposition frequently inspired patrons to throw beer bottles at the screen.

"At midnight shows in the '70s, you just assumed that everybody was drunk or stoned or both," he says. "We sometimes spent hours cleaning up the beer bottles."