Photograph of a mummy character with blue text on a white background

This is one of the buttons from the Batty Buttons Universal Monsters collection created by Tops, a manufacturer of pinback buttons and other collectables. The Universal Monsters buttons came in 8 varieties and each one features an iconic monster from Universal movies. This button features the “Mummy”, a monster seen in Universal’s The Mummy (1932), The Mummy’s Curse (1944), and The Mummy’s Tomb (1942). 

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Anti-corporatist sentiment reached all-time highs with the 1848 release of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ The Communist Manifesto. The political document helped frame all of history as a class struggle between corporate masters and their poor laborers. Anti-corporatist activists continue to harken back to this foundational text to inform their worldview. Generally, they believe that large corporations pose a threat to free society and that business tycoons are “manipulating government” and “creating false needs in consumers.”

Since 1980, Ephemera, Inc. has made buttons, magnets, and stickers out of their San Francisco, California headquarters. The company started out by producing pin-back buttons for local punk rock bands but later branched out to manufacture a variety of small trinkets. Today, they are located in Phoenix, Oregon and consider themselves a “maker of funny, sarcastic and offensive” buttons (Ephemera, Inc., n.d.).

Black illustration of a longhaired man holding a surfboard with black text on a yellow background

“Pray for Sex” refers to graffiti painted on a rock on Makua Beach in Oahu, Hawaii using the humorous play on a surfing term. Local surfers originally used the common phrase “Pray for Surf” which changed to “Pray for Sets” referring to “sets” of waves. In the 1960s, “Pray for Sex” was spray-painted on a large rock and has since become part of the surf culture lexicon.

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This timeless joke is used in common conversation and several forms of media and art for decades. The phrase “watch someone like a hawk” uses a hawk’s keen eyesight to suggest watching someone carefully to make sure they don’t do something bad, or perhaps wrong to the viewer. The addition of someone’s wife to this phrase relates to a wife's watchful attributes in a humorous and playful phrase.

Illustration of a penguin with black text above and below on a white background

In the early 1960s newspaper columnist Arthur 'Art' Hoppe invented the slogan on this button. His book The Love Everybody* Crusade (* Except Antarcticans) was published by Doubleday in 1963.

Illustration of a character wearing glasses with an ice block on its head and yellow text on a blue background

In April, 1958 Herb Caen, a columnist at San Francisco Chronicle, coined the term “Beatnik” to satirize the Beat Generation; the word was meant to invoke Sputnik, the Russian satellite. Beatnik fashion trends —black turtlenecks, leggings, straight cigarette pants, dark glasses, goatees, berets, horizontal striped shirts, and loose sweaters—gained in popularity throughout the early 1960s. In popular culture, silly, chill, and indifferent characters represented beatniks; they typically frequented coffee shops, played the bongos, and used drugs. Beatnik lingo also influenced the 1960s American popular vernacular, with words such as "cat", "chick", “cool”, “like”, “crazy”, “dig”, and “rad”

In reality, though, the Beat Generation was a literary movement that began in the 1940s and was centered around a rejection of capitalism, materialism, and conformity to the status quo. Writers like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac referred to themselves as Beats, meaning “weary” and “beatific”. They worked on their craft, and explored spirituality by experimenting with drugs, jazz, sensuality, and Eastern religions.

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ExxonMobil was founded in 1870 by John D. Rockefeller to capitalize on the newly founded oil business, which started when oil was discovered in the United States in 1859. Exxon was founded as Standard Oil Company in Ohio. Originally the company was a regional provider of kerosene, before making the transition into other ventures such as petroleum. The company rebranded many times, finally becoming Exxon in 1972.

Exxon, being an oil company, was used as an insult in the phrase, "Who does your hair? Exxon?," implying that the reader has oily hair. Depending on the tone, it may also be used as a lighthearted joke. Since Exxon is associated with the oil business, this is a clever jab to comment on someone’s oily hair without outright expressing it.

Blue and white illustration of a wolf over blue text on a white background with an outer blue edge

The fable of The Boy Who Cried Wolf is a classic story attributed to Aesop. It tells of a shepherd boy who repeatedly tricks villagers into believing a wolf is attacking his flock. When a real wolf finally appears and the boy calls for help, the villagers, having been fooled before, don't believe him. As a result, the sheep are devoured by the wolf. The moral of the story is that those who lie frequently will not be believed, even when they speak the truth.

Johnson Smith & Company began in Chicago, Illinois in 1914 as a mail-order novelty and gag gift supplier, settling in Racine, Wisconsin in 1926. Johnson Smith & Co. or Johnson Smith Company sold an array of toys including pinback buttons with suggestive slogans meant as ice breakers.  Their 1929 catalogue touts, “These Buttons provide subjects for pleasant jokes and amusing conversations, and thus smooth the way to a more familiar acquaintance and cordial friendship. They are very wittily worded and quite unobjectionable. Wear one and see the effect.”

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