Tony kept one or two of nearly every button he ever made. This is the archive being opened up — from high school gyms to the convention floor to the campaign store.
Obama for America · 2008
The official online store for the 2008 campaign, built around a McCain-Feingold provision that let a vendor sell official items direct to supporters. Six warehouses, crews around the clock, and more than a million packages out the door.
500+ high schools, nationwide · 1978
The idea that built the business: the entire roster on a single three-and-a-half-inch button. Basketball, football and marching band, in five or six hundred schools across the country.
Belfry Bats · Frankfort Hot Dogs · Running Orphans · Polka Dots · 1980
Tony kept one or two of almost every button he ever made. The high school archive is a map of American team names — and it is being assembled into a collage.
Washington D.C. · 1984
The buttons he hitchhiked to Washington with. Colour photography was still rare and expensive — which is exactly why they sold out by the Reflecting Pool.
Iran hostage crisis · 1984
Made alongside the Reagan buttons for that first Washington trip — the hostage story that the whole country had been counting.
Democratic National Convention, San Francisco · 1984
Manufactured on site, on demand, out of a truck rigged with an air compressor — Mondale and Ferraro, Jesse Jackson, Gary Hart, printed as the floor called for them.
Democratic National Convention, Atlanta · 1988
As official vendor with a crew of fifty: buttons, shirts, hats and the novelty donkey calls, branded through the convention hall.
Springfield, Illinois · February 2007 · 2007
Handed out in the cold on the day the campaign began. The favourite of the run: Abraham Lincoln wearing an Obama T-shirt.
Major League Baseball · NFL · NBA · 1990
Licensed buttons for the leagues — Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan — printed on the photographic backgrounds that had become the signature of the shop.
Democratic National Convention, Boston · 2004
A working factory on site as official vendor: buttons and shirts made overnight for the hall and the hotels, then sold the same day they were needed.