The Verso Project: A Traveler From Germany

This limited edition T-shirt is part of the first capsule collection of The Verso Project, an archival storytelling initiative from The New York Times Store that highlights rarely seen images from The Times’s archives. The shirt front features a highly detailed reproduction of a raw, unedited Times photo. The back of the shirt shows the reverse side of the print, also known as the verso, mirroring the physical photograph and telling the story of its usage through hasty annotations and glued on newspaper clippings.

From image selection to T-shirt color (transfer paper blue, a reference to the reproduction techniques of yore), every element in this capsule collection is highly considered. They are hand-printed by Philadelphia Printworks, a Black-owned, socially conscious heritage brand and screen-printing workshop inspired by past and present social equity movements. Shirts from The Verso Project are limited edition and single run. Once they sell out, they will not be produced or made available for sale again.

Printed on this shirt is a photo of a scruffy, sunglasses-wearing, 11-month-old pup named Mickey. This photo was originally published in The Times on Sunday, Aug. 31, 1947, under the comically mundane headline “A Traveler From Germany.” The caption under the image, however, recalls a dark historical backdrop of lingering unrest two years after World War II had ended. Mickey, it says, has just arrived at LaGuardia Field (now LaGuardia Airport) from Frankfurt and is en route to Guttenberg, Iowa, where he will be adopted by the parents of Lieut. L.B. Shaffer, who is serving with the American Occupation Forces overseas.

On the back of the photo, which is reproduced on the back of this shirt, the cutout headline and caption that accompanied the image in the paper is adhered with tape or glue. It’s also been marked with several ink stamps, including one that reads “Pan American World Airways System,” a reference to the photo’s backstory. As with most versos, this one is marked with the date of publication in the paper, with the day of the week messily scrawled and circled in pencil just above.