The Verso Project: Happiness is a Warm Pup

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.

Is there anything better than a basket full of puppies? The photo on this shirt of six adorable, downy soft, six-week-old collies nestled together in a basket was originally published in the Sports section of The Times in April of 1942. It was later repurposed in another article on September 23, 1984, the intriguing headline of which read, “Can Happiness Be a Warm Puppy?”